Camille caught her breath. She stared some more, looking back and forth at the photos. Lisette and Didier. She couldn’t be certain from the Lisette photo, since it was in black and white, but the tones of the picture suggested that her father’s mother had light blond hair and pale eyes. Lisette and Didier Palomar were both as blond as Vikings.

Then Camille grabbed a picture of her father—a shot taken soon after his arrival in America. In the photo, he was just eighteen or nineteen, close to Lisette’s age. Camille compared their features. Like his mother, he had full lips, prominent cheekbones, wide-set eyes, and a strong chin. Unlike her, he had curly black hair, deep brown eyes, and olive-toned skin.

Between Didier and Henry, she could see no resemblance at all.

More unsettling was the fact that Henry’s coloring—and hers, and Julie’s, for that matter—was wildly different from his parents’.

The question nagged at her. How could these two Aryan-featured people have had a son with Henry’s coloring? Was there some other branch of the family tree?

She set down her glass of wine and picked up the old camera, feeling its heft in her hands. Then she looked at Lisette. “Who were you?” Camille asked in French. “What were you thinking in that moment? Why do you look so sad?”

Camille tried to imagine the stories going through Lisette’s head as she pressed the shutter, capturing a haunted moment. Camille had spent a long time studying every detail of the photograph. Based on the state of Lisette’s pregnancy, the pictures on the film roll might have been the last photos she ever took.

Imakepesto: Hello? Did I lose you?

Transfixed by the photos, Camille didn’t reply to the message. She lifted the old camera to her eye and peered into the viewfinder, wondering what had gone through Lisette’s mind when she took a photo. Still speaking French, she said, “I wish I’d known you. What could you have told me? What secrets are you hiding?”

Part 2

The Var

What makes photography a strange invention is that its primary raw materials are light and time.

—John Berger, English art critic

Nine

Bellerive, the Var, France

1941

Lisette Galli held Dr. Toselli’s wonderful camera in her hands. “You’re giving this to me? Surely you cannot part with it.”

The elderly Dr. Cyprian Toselli, her employer, held up his hand. “Consider it a special gift for your sixteenth birthday.”

She smiled. “I turned sixteen three months ago.”

“You know how forgetful I am. It’s my favorite camera, and it would be a shame to think of it sitting unused in its box. Sadly, I can no longer use it.” Dr. Toselli, an expert photographer with many years of experience, was slowly going blind. A veterinarian by profession, he had planned to spend his retirement taking photos and printing the images in his darkroom. Now, sadly, he would spend it in the dark.

“It is too fine,” she said. “I can’t accept it.” Ah, but she yearned to. For the past two years, she had been keeping house and tending the garden for a small wage. When he’d noticed her interest in photography, he’d given her lessons, which she had absorbed like one of the sea sponges sold at the Bandol docks.

“Lisette, it would please me so much to know my favorite camera is in your talented hands, capturing images the way I taught you. The moments of life are ephemeral and unpredictable. We must capture the best ones and keep them safe in our hearts. If you have learned nothing else from me, you must learn this.”

His words brought a burn of tears to her eyes. Lisette’s two older brothers had both been killed early on in the Battle of France. Étienne had served as a chasseur alpin, attached to a mountain regiment of foot soldiers. He had been shot while defending a strategic position along the Maginot Line in the northeast. Roland, perhaps even more tragically, died after a fistfight with fellow soldiers in his unit who had accused him of a shameful vice she scarcely understood. She had made a few portraits of them before they’d gone off to join the fighting, and now she cherished these images with all her heart.

She bit her lip. “You’re far too kind.”

“On the contrary, I am a selfish old man. I am greedy for the pleasure it gives me to help you learn to do something I have loved all my life. And also, I do not trust the Italian soldiers. Ever since they took over our little village, certain things have been disappearing. I know you will keep my camera safe.”

She shuddered, remembering how the Italians had rampaged through the streets, claiming revenge for their comrades who had been killed during the invasion. The soldiers had raided the summer villas of rich English and Parisian aristocrats, but they were not above robbing the common folk as well. A tenuous order had been recently restored, thanks to a truce struck between the Italian Armistice Commission and local officials. But no one in Bellerive trusted the soldiers.

The Italian invasion was a horrible blow to France, which had already fought for—and lost—its northern region to Germany. Last June, Paris had been bombed in broad daylight and then declared “ville ouverte” to the Germans, and the new leader, Maréchal Pétain, had signed an armistice. While reading the news to Dr. Toselli, she’d discovered that all the world condemned the action. The president of America, Monsieur Roosevelt, declared that “the hand that held the dagger has plunged it into the back of its neighbor.” France had been cut in two—the occupied zone to the north, and the so-called free zone here in the south. But there was no freedom here, merely a different foreign authority to answer to.

She set the camera in its box and latched it shut, gazing down at the initials CT, letter-pressed in the lid. “In that case, I will do exactly as you say. I will take marvelous pictures with your camera, and keep it safe, always.”

He reached out to pat her hand, but missed the first pat. She discreetly moved her hand so that he could touch it. The gentle gesture brought tears to her eyes. Over the past several years, he had been gradually losing his vision to a condition known as macular degeneration. He told her the blindness closed in like the aperture of a camera lens, narrowing the field of vision until he felt as though he was peering through an ever-shrinking tunnel.

“Your pictures are excellent, with your keen eye for the details of daily life. Promise you will keep practicing your craft. The darkroom is for your use, as always.” The darkroom in the pantry was a perfect laboratory, complete with photographic enlarger, special paper and chemicals, and fresh water pumped from outside.

He was a dear man, and Lisette would have helped him for no charge. But he insisted on paying her a wage. He understood the hardships of her family all too well, and he understood the dignity of work. “I don’t know how to thank you, monsieur. You’re very generous.”

“Very good, then,” he said. “That is settled, and I am content. What time is it?”

She looked out the window at the large clock face over the railway station. “Half past five.”

“Perfect. I should like an aperitif, then, and perhaps a chapter of our book before you leave.”

“Of course. I’ll just be a minute.” She tucked the camera box into her woven-straw market basket. Then she went and poured precisely two fingers of Ricard into a slender drinking glass, adding one chunk of ice from the precious supply in the icebox. Due to the deprivations of war, refrigeration was hard to come by, but Toselli had a special need for it. He was secretly making a wonder drug—penicillin—for the war effort. With his medical and scientific background, and the equipment from his veterinary practice, he knew just what to do, and Lisette was eager to help him titrate the medicine and keep it hidden.

If the invading forces found out, his supply would be seized and he’d probably be arrested. Lisette thought it was marvelous that this elderly man could contribute to the French cause. From the very start, she had guarded his secret. The occupying soldiers regarded him as a harmless old man, never realizing what was going on right under their noses.

“Let us go out to the garden terrace,” he said. “I love to feel the sun on my face.”

“Of course. I am right behind you.”

He picked up the book she was reading to him and tucked it under his arm. Then he led the way across the small sitting room to the garden behind the house. He touched things as he passed—the back of a kitchen chair, the side of a cabinet, the hall tree with his hat, cane, and umbrella. Lisette was meticulous about keeping everything exactly in its place. She had made it her mission to help him organize his home so he could find what he needed.