CHAPTER THREE
I DID NOT BEGIN TO APPRECIATE WHAT AN EXPLOSIVE topic my grandparents’ marriage might be until I visited my grandfather on my own for the first time, a few months after I turned fourteen. He had forgotten about the safari but not about me, and he invited me to come stay with him for ten days over my spring break.
As a child, I saw very little of my grandfather. The summer after I was born he’d had a linden tree planted in my honor in our front yard, a gesture typical of him in that it was not on time, required more work of other people than it did of him, and was the poetic vehicle for a painful memory he kept secret from the gesture’s recipient. (In this case, the lindens that lined the Boulevard Tauler, the street he grew up on in Strasbourg—which were destroyed, along with his home, during the war.) For years I associated my grandfather with that linden and not much else: I posed there for annual photographs so he could mark the growth of me and the tree; we’d pose there together on the rare occasions he visited us from Geneva.
Armand on one of his rare visits to Asheville, in June 1982 (carefully timed to avoid crossing paths with Anna).
My grandfather, even by my family’s standards, was a uniquely difficult character. He thought nothing of making you peel all the chickpeas in the dish you were preparing because he had recently read that chickpea skins were disruptive to the digestive system. Or of asking you to replace the buttons on your shirt before he left the house with you because he felt they were too gaudy. Or of snubbing you forever if you served him bad wine. He kept binder notebooks on members of the family of whom he particularly disapproved.
The last time he had come to Asheville was in 1990, when I was nine years old. He cut short his stay with us because he thought the guest room smelled of something ineffably and unbearably noxious. When pressed, he compared the scent to mothballs but would say no more than that. He declared it impossible to sleep with such an odor. My mother could not smell it, and that made him even more aggrieved.
This was the man I set off to visit in 1996, having seen him just once in the years following his abbreviated stay. A friend once asked me why my mother let me go see him alone, knowing as we did his extensive capacity for unpleasantness. What can I say? The vicissitudes of my family’s fortunes meant there weren’t many of us left; he was the only grandfather I had.
His apartment in Geneva was like a tiny museum, lined with books and curios, smelling cleanly of bergamot, rosemary, paper and pencil, and pipe tobacco. It was full of clear light that poured in from big picture windows, the ones in his dining room overlooking the Jura, the ones in his living room overlooking the Alps, the Lac Léman, and Geneva’s old town. When I arrived, my grandfather showed me where I would sleep, a daybed in that living room, which also served as his office and guest quarters, and then went to make tea. After tea, he gave me a sponge, blue to match the color scheme in the kitchen, with which I was to wipe away any stray drops of water I might accidentally let fall on the tile floor. There was another one just like it in the bathroom. A mini-vacuum cleaner sat in the corner of the dining room; he pointed it out so I could clean up any crumbs I might drop while eating. He showed me how to brush back the carpet pile where I stepped on it so I wouldn’t scuff it.
I realized quickly that my grandfather was not a maniacally orderly man; he was just intensely territorial. He needed me to cover my tracks.
During those ten days, we grew almost easy with each other, and perhaps I became overconfident, lulled into believing I had gotten the hang of my grandfather and his carpet pile, for one morning at breakfast, when he reached across the table for my hand and asked about the amethyst ring I was wearing, I said, “Maybe you recognize it.” He shook his head, and I added, “It belonged to my grandmother.”
A certain dark stillness settles into the air before a rainstorm bursts out of the sky and sozzles you. In the stillness I noticed my grandfather’s face looked white and drawn, and it occurred to me that perhaps I had made a mistake. “Your grandmother? Your grandmother. May I ask”—he could barely bring himself to say the words—“may I ask whether you … whether you see her regularly?”
I nodded. Abruptly, he pushed himself away from the table and snatched up our breakfast things. He set them in the sink, jerked the faucet on, and began washing. “And what do you think of her?”
“Well,” I began, trying to be prudent, “she’s my grandmother, and I—”
My grandfather snapped off the water, and the sentence faded in my mouth. He turned to face me. “You’ll have to be forgiven for that, I suppose. You do not know her as I do.”
That was certainly true, so I shook my head.
“Do you know what I call her?”
I shook my head again.
“Seraphina. In irony, of course.” He jerked the faucet back on and resumed rinsing the dishes. I did not know what to say. “She left me, you know,” he fumed.
“Yes, is that why—” I started to say, thinking of something my mother had told me recently about my grandmother taking the children to Israel at the last minute instead of moving back to Europe when my grandfather’s transfer from the UN’s New York headquarters back to Geneva came through. But he did not seem to hear me.
There was only one small teacup left to clean, but he left the water running, and it poured out of the faucet and landed in the sink with a harsh, metallic sound. “Of course you may think she is just a nice little old lady in a ruffled apron serving you cookies, but you do not know what poison she hides. For years, she has been trying to ruin my life. Horrible woman.”
I sat still. I had never seen my grandmother wear ruffles. Or bake cookies.
“The last time I saw her she had come all the way to the United Nations to try and get money out of me via the personnel office—to try and ruin my reputation. And of all things, I happened to be walking past the office when she came out. And do you know what she did?”
I shook my head.
“Do you know what she did?”
I cringed and kept shaking my head.
“She came up to me, said hello, and asked me for a ride to the train station.”
The water still splattered angrily against the sink’s metal sides. That did seem exactly like something my grandmother would do, but I refrained from saying so.
“Do you know what that is like?” He set the teacup in the dish drainer in a way that made me fear for its well-being. I shook my head again.
“That is like shitting on someone’s doorstep, ringing the doorbell, and asking for toilet paper.”
He rinsed the soap out of the sponge and wrathfully threw it down. “I should never, ever have married her.”
“Why did you?” I regretted it as soon as I said it and sat waiting for I knew not what fury to descend on me.
He turned to face me, the open faucet forgotten, hands dripping water all over the floor. “I couldn’t … and the war … what else could I do?” He looked helpless, shipwrecked, lost. “She was beautiful,” he said, his voice bewildered, almost dreamy. “She had beautiful hair. Beautiful coal-black hair.”
CHAPTER FOUR
AS I ENTERED THE THICK OF ADOLESCENCE, THE closeness my grandmother and I had once enjoyed became far less enjoyable. It still existed, somewhere, but we had trouble finding our way into it, and when we did, it was often to have an argument. Grandma may have spent a good deal of her career treating adolescents, but outside her office it was a phase of life for which she had no patience. In her mind, the teens were just another mystifying and wasteful American invention, like colored bathroom tissue or instant pancake mix. “That’s American teenagers for you. No respect,” she’d grouse if I failed to clear a plate from the table or wore glitter and mismatched socks to dinner. “Go and change. Someone will think you’re an escaped mental patient. Slovenliness is a dead giveaway.”
Indeed, I believe she decided to send me back across the ocean to check—or at least temper—my objectionable slide into one of the parts of her adoptive culture she liked the least.
When I announced I was bored in school and wanted to try something new, my mother phoned my grandmother for advice.
Grandma didn’t hesitate. “Send her to Geneva,” she instructed.
“Isn’t that far?” my mother objected.
Grandma brushed her off. After all, at sixteen she had moved from Romania to France to pursue her medical studies, a fifty-six-hour train ride from home.
“It will be good for her.” Her voice left no room for argument. “Your father will help pay for it.”
“What makes you think Daddy would want to help Miranda with her studies? It’s not like he ever helped you with mine.”
“You’ll see. He’ll be glad to have his granddaughter with him.”
As though the decades had been minutes and she could still predict the motions of his mind.
On the day of my departure, Grandma accompanied my parents and me to the airport. Sitting in the backseat and holding her hand, I felt sentimental and very grown up and, though I would have been loath to admit it, a little nervous. Seeing my smooth hand cupped in her brown-speckled one, I felt moved to say something about how much she meant to me, how I adulated her strength and wisdom, how I had all the spots on her skin memorized, how I would miss her. “My Godt,” she said, pulling her hand away with a little snort of irritation, “don’t talk like that. It’s bad luck.”
The less said about my life at boarding school, the better; it was lonely and largely uninteresting—Grandma’s convenient excuse, I am now convinced, to get me where she intended me to go. Every Friday I’d pack my overnight bag and walk the three miles that separated the boardinghouse from my grandfather’s apartment, where I’d spend the weekend experiencing a second, albeit more interesting, form of loneliness, for you can get only so close to a compulsively solitary and excessively punctilious eighty-one-year-old.
He certainly made an effort: he filled the wooden bowls on his honey-colored dining room table with my favorite fruits, found recipes for us to try together, read Proust aloud to me over linden blossom tea and madeleines, and picked out poems for me to memorize to perfect my French. But settling into a routine together was not easy. I was always making mistakes. Once I spilled ink on his dressing gown and spent a fearful evening convinced he would ask me to leave and never speak to me again. He thought I held my pen wrong and mentioned it so often that I taught myself to position my fingers differently so I could do my homework and write letters at his house without irking him. I quickly learned it was best to avoid the Shakespeare authorship question. I kept my hair up at all times because he didn’t like it left loose. But worst of all was the day I came back from a walk with a handful of four-leaf clovers. I was pleased to know that my gift for finding them functioned on both sides of the Atlantic and thought it would be nice to share it with him. I had forgotten the provenance of this gift, but my grandfather hadn’t.
I walked over to his desk, where he was correcting an article for a friend, and held the clovers out to him, a little offering cupped in the palm of my hand.
He peered at it and recoiled violently, pushing himself back in his chair, as far away from me as he could. His face drained of color. He looked so pale and horrified, I checked the clovers to make sure they weren’t harboring some dangerous insect.
“Witches,” he croaked. His voice was strangled and low, his gaze mistrustful, as if I might pull some other awful trick. “You’re all witches.”
Noticing differences between my grandparents became a kind of hobby that year. Cooking was the first to stand out: Grandma improvised her dishes with whatever she could find—stale cookies, squishy kiwis, a half teaspoon of leftover oatmeal. Grandpa, on the other hand, excelled at ornate dishes that required precision timing and ingredients you had to go out of your way to buy. Grandma could not bear to throw away food—waste gave her nightmares. She even fished the bay leaves out of her stews, washed and dried them, and put them back in the jar for later use. My grandfather tossed things out with something approaching relish: a lettuce leaf with a tiny spot, the green middle of the garlic clove, the white flesh in the not-quite-ripe tomato—all of it went into the trash with less than no regret. Grandma favored bright colors, and Grandpa wore only muted ones; she preferred flowers, and he preferred leaves; she liked Rilke, and he liked Baudelaire; she watched TV, and he listened to the radio. Unlike my grandmother, who clung to her Austro-Hungarian-Romano-Franco-Yiddish accent as a last link to a lost world, my grandfather’s English was impeccable, spoken with more heed and purity than any BBC announcer. Where Grandma divined my sentences before I even spoke them, Grandpa pretended not to understand me at all unless I enunciated as he did, removing all trace of America from my words.
But their biggest difference was the war. My grandmother’s war seemed almost friendly, almost enviable. I loved to hear her tell of that perilous era and all her near misses. She called the war “the university of my life” and took a zestful, triumphant pride in all the ingenious ways she’d figured out how to survive. Grandma believed everything in life came with a lesson, and the lesson she conveyed as she told of her encounters during the war, from the gendarme who’d kept her off the deportation lists to the woman who took her in for the night just to keep the Nazis from requisitioning her spare bedroom, was that everyone she’d met was just as luckless—or lucky, depending on how you looked at it—as she. My grandmother surged through life armed with a lid she clapped over her memories when they got out of hand, keeping discipline among them with a battery of axioms and aphorisms. If she had survived, it was because whatever comes, comes for the best—as she reminded me over and over. Grandma had deep faith in a God whose goodness she’d accepted she would never comprehend. If everything happens for the best, what right did she have to question? What right had she to founder in grief?
My grandfather did not believe he was lucky. God had not been good to him, and in retaliation, he had become an atheist, a revenge he exacted daily on the Holy One, lest the Holy One forget. My grandfather spent his days remembering; after all, if God did not exist, then someone had to do it. His house was filled with books and articles on the persecution of the Jews during World War II, and he regularly attended conferences and films on the subject. The only Jewish holiday he observed was Holocaust Remembrance Day, when he forced himself to sit through at least three hours of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah. But much like the God he didn’t believe in, he did his remembering in silence. He never said anything about what had happened to his parents, and I never dared to ask him. I knew a little from hints and slips of stories I’d picked up from other people in the family, but broaching the topic with him seemed as foolhardy as exposing pure sodium to air, as if it could spark a grief strong enough to deafen and blind us, a white-hot sadness that would stun and burn us beyond remedy.
Once a week though, on Shabbat, I would strike a single, dangerous match. The first time I asked if I could light candles I was merely homesick and hadn’t considered the implications of my request. Grandpa, in his perfect, measured English, reminded me of them immediately: “You understand, I hope, that I no longer believe in God after what happened. During the war, you know.” Then he added, “If it makes you happy, please go ahead. But I shall not participate.”
Nevertheless, he retreated to his room and returned with a pair of candlesticks. He set them in the middle of the dining room table and rummaged through the hall closet until he found a box of candles. Then he stood back and looked at me a little defiantly. “There’s no challah,” he observed.
“I’ll just use ordinary bread.” I took some from the kitchen, set it on a plate, and covered it with a paper napkin. We stood there awkwardly.
“I can open a bottle of wine,” Grandpa suggested. “I shall go get one from the cellar.”
When he uncorked the bottle, I unfolded another paper napkin and covered my head. Outside it was already dark, the blue night stained green by the streetlamps and orange from the floodlights gleaming off the soccer stadium across the st
reet. I scraped the match against the box and it puffed into a flame; I lit the two candles, gestured the light toward me, and cupped my hands over my eyes. The apartment grew even quieter. I wondered, as I said the blessing, whether Grandpa had slipped out of the room. When I uncovered my eyes, I looked through the dim glow of the candles and saw he was weeping, his shoulders shuddering, just barely suppressing sobs. He looked up at me with wide eyes I could hardly bear to meet.
“My mother,” he whispered hoarsely.
The next week he asked me to come on Saturday morning. Then I went back to showing up on Friday night, and every time he would pause in our dinner preparations to ask, “Are you going to light candles?”
And with some subterranean instinct that it was necessary to shine at least a wavering beam across the darkened plane of his past, I would always answer in the affirmative. Weeks went by in which every Friday night was the same: I would touch the match to the candlewick, and he would begin to weep, and I would weep with him, and we would eat our dinner in near silence.
Then one Friday night he appeared at the table wearing a kippah. “I found this,” he announced, as if he’d picked it up off the ground in the park. “I thought I didn’t have one anymore.” He wore it every Friday after that. A few weeks later a braided loaf appeared on the table. By spring, we made it through the ritual without crying, exchanging a tiny smile once the candles were lit.
And one day he led me into his bedroom to show me something new: a glass frame he’d hung over his bed. In it were the only photographs remaining from his childhood, a posed portrait of him with his parents and siblings and a snapshot of his young mother.
“You see,” he said, and though I waited, he said no more. He smiled and touched my cheek, and we left the room without another word. That was all he ever told me about his parents.
Despite his forbidding silence, living with my grandfather finally allowed me to put words to the fears and nightmares from which I had suffered for as long as I could remember. His vast library taught me many things, including that I was part of a community of people coming to terms with a genocide. And if his library taught me the vocabulary and the history, he himself taught me to recognize the landscape in which the survivors of destruction live their lives, to see that minefield of guilt and sadness for what it was. Hints of the people and the world lost were everywhere, waiting to blow holes in his fragile hold on the present. Just as I vacuumed my crumbs and wiped up my water droplets, I did my best, for his sake and mine, not to disturb the minefield. Little did I know, he was still suffering from the fallout of a single explosion, the one that had originally blown him and my grandmother apart.
A Fifty-Year Silence: Love, War, and a Ruined House in France Page 3