Elena Poniatowska - Leonora

‘Anyone may paint anywhere, provided their family can bring them the materials to work with.’

They stay out in the yard all day. Max paints Alice in 39, a little picture in the style of a Russian Orthodox icon. In it, he revisits Leonora among the trees.

They are deporting Jews back to Germany from the camp at Les Milles, and the French authorities now inform Bellmer and Ernst that they are to be removed to North Africa, to work at laying railway lines.

In November 1939, and in desperation, Max sends a card to Jimmy, his son in New York. He reminds him that his father is interned in a concentration camp at Les Milles. Surely he can use his contacts to assist in liberating him from his imminent fate? ‘Do something. Approach important people who can be of help.’

He emerges free at Christmas-time, and spends the winter snowed in at St. Martin d’Ardèche with Leonora. It is a novel experience for them both, not only because of the snow, but because the peasants who had once believed he was French now know him to be German, and when the couple go into the village, only Alphonsine opens her arms to him.

‘Whatever happens, I still need to explore the limits of my mind,’ Max says.

‘While you still have the time … ever since I’ve been with you, I’ve developed a sense of danger I never had before.’

‘I feel just as you do. I go from one extreme mental state to another, and each time I become more conscious of what awaits me.’

Leonora conceals from Max that when she went to Paris she ambushed Marie-Berthe and gave her a pummelling she still thinks of fondly.

‘What about Hans Bellmer, Max?’

‘He must have got out a few days after me.’

‘Are you sure about that?’

‘No.’

Someone in the village denounces Max, and the gendarme presents himself at the door again.

‘You are a German and as of now are under arrest.’

‘Leonora, calm down! Speak to our friends. They have already let me out once.’

‘Sit down and control yourself, Madame,’ the policeman orders Leonora, who is trembling so much her teeth are chattering.

The terror in her eyes fills the entire room.

‘Your husband is not the only one,’ the gendarme explains. ‘The concentration camp is now full to bursting. The order has been given to hold all foreigners under control. They are all to be deported.’

It doesn’t even occur to Max to embrace her. He stares straight ahead until the policeman handcuffs him, takes him by the arm, and leads him away.

No sooner have they gone than Leonora throws herself on top of the heap of potatoes. It disintegrates under her weight, scattering potatoes across the kitchen’s tiled floor. She doesn’t pick them up because her tears prevent her from seeing clearly. Instead, she goes down to the village and drinks several glasses of marc . When Alphonsine finally lets her know it is closing time, she returns home. She downs a bottle of Eau de Cologne, and spends the whole night vomiting, in the hope that the spasms wracking her body will lessen the pain of her suffering. When dawn breaks, she reaches a decision: ‘I need to start moving. The only way of surviving this is to get to work.’

With no food in her stomach and without a hat on her head, she goes down to the vines and cuts off one bunch of grapes at a time, until the sun scorches and puts a crick in her neck. Despite her best efforts, Max’s absence consumes her. When she returns home, she bends over the lavatory and puts her fingers down her throat. She tries to vomit, but nothing comes up, her throat is a raw red ember, her chest burns, her whole body shakes. She goes up and down stairs from bedroom to kitchen and finally lies down on the mound of potatoes.

For the whole of the next week she eats boiled potatoes, one or often only half at a time. She has never been possessed of such strength in her life. She rises with the sun, and goes to bed when it sets. In the morning, she leaps out of bed before bad thoughts assail her, and, as she sleeps in her clothes, she runs straight out to attend to her vines. Sweat pours off her, the nape of her neck is permanently dripping. ‘I am set on total purification!’ she tells herself, and doesn’t budge until she sees the sun set over the horizon. Every time a memory of Max drifts across her thoughts, she makes an effort of will to exclude it from her mind. Better to think only of a potato, all of life a potato. ‘Maybe I could go to the village and buy some butter, then bake myself a potato in the oven this evening.’ Sometimes she feels reflective: ‘I never knew that wine, as well as a stimulant, was such good nourishment, it keeps my strength up.’ On Sundays she takes her clothes off and sunbathes on the flat roof, stretched out like a lizard, before downing a full bottle of wine. Every night she downs another. Wine is extraordinary, and provides the best of therapies.

The feast day of Saint John is drawing near. Leonora goes to the village to buy butter.

‘What a strange war!’ the villagers in the dairy are saying.

In Paris they call it la drôle de guerre , and relate how in Holland the children wave at the Luftwaffe planes and laugh out loud. How can they understand that the Germans are now their enemies? In the Polish countryside, farm labourers and women with colourful scarves on their heads carry on working as if nothing had happened. A whole group of Belgians have arrived in the village. During the Great War, the Germans raped their country: Belgium has become the symbol of German treachery. They sank the Lusitania . In Paris, all the cafés are full. The French are having a good time, disregarding Poland’s tragedy. An invasion? Fonfon is not to be seen. Ever since the gendarme took Max away, she hasn’t been seen anywhere other than in her café, when she comes over to serve Leonora another glass of marc . In the dairy, the owner can barely manage to be civil; and he used always to pay her court for being so beautiful. He asks her if the butter is for snails.

‘It seems as though someone came to your house in the night and robbed you of your snails.’

‘My what?’

‘Be careful, they say that you’re a spy. You could be denounced.’

‘Are you going to bring a lantern and hunt me down like the snails?’ Leonora asks.

The Englishwoman isn’t afraid of the war. She just wants Max back.

At night she closes her eyes against her filthy pillow of potatoes, and repeats the phrase that she introduced several days ago and now utters with absolute certainty: ‘I am not fated to die here.’

That was how, on 24th June 1940, Catherine Yarrow, an old friend of Leonora’s, finds her. Catherine, who is tall, slim and British, arrives with Michel Lukacs, her ungainly lover.

‘Leonora, these are bad times. I don’t think you can stay here.’

Leonora scarcely hears her:

‘I’ll go to the kitchen garden and pick a lettuce, I want to make a big salad for you both, and I have olives, tomatoes, olive oil. It’ll be a kind of Salade Niçoise, or almost a Niçoise, and I have some aubergines too.’

She returns from the vegetable plot covered in mud. She has fallen over. And her arms are empty.

‘What on earth did I go down to the kitchen garden to bring? You two are going to be staying here, aren’t you? I’ll sleep in the kitchen so I can hear if anyone knocks at the door, and the potatoes can be my pillow.’

Catherine looks at her fiancé in alarm. Then she looks back at Leonora, busy lighting a new cigarette from the last, chain-smoking so hurriedly that at one moment it seems she might in fact burn her face.

‘Max will be here at any moment,’ she announces. A sudden flash of terror streaks across her black eyes.

To be mad is to pace up and down without knowing why or what for, and getting lost along the way. ‘It is to wander into the unknown with the abandon and the values of the ignorant.’