But I knew, deep down, that I didn’t really live there, and that made me sad. At times I felt as if I’d never been so at home, and at times I felt like a beggar at a window, dazzled by a thing that wasn’t mine. Already, I was plotting my return. I couldn’t help believing that if I came there for good, I would be freed from the weight of my history, that I could escape the past by living somewhere that embodied it.
My friends and I drank wine, cooked big dinners, and lazed around on the terrace, and that was grand, but intellectually, the summer was deeply frustrating. I traveled to hot dusty archives and found snippets of information about deeds and titles and marriages and fealties and charters, but they revealed little about the people who had felt hungry and angry and happy and tired within the thick rampart walls of Alba and La Roche. Medieval studies had revealed a world of historical scholarship that I loved as much as my grandparents’ house, and I dearly wished to link the two together in some sort of grand unified field theory of the past. I’d applied for the grant with this modest hope in mind, but as I scrubbed stone floors, listened for footsteps in the street, or squished my laundry around in a tub, I began to see the cracks in my plan. All the fantasizing I did about what life might have been like for the people who had once lived there hardly amounted to history or even explained why I felt such a deep connection to the village. Many were the days I abandoned the archives and retreated to the ruined part of the house, staring at the rubble of old newspapers, dusty lumber, and brambles pushing in through the windows, feeling completely baffled that life had propelled me to this improbable, run-down place. I knew my grandparents and their silence were at the root of it, but the more I pondered it, the more mysterious I found the connection between their outsize personalities and the house in La Roche. My grandparents’ story was like a fairy tale whose particulars had been forgotten, glamorous in its details and secrets. I liked to imagine their love as dizzy and spectacular, with an ache behind it I couldn’t identify. I felt like an archaeologist, or an undersea diver, certain that if I picked through the debris in the house I would find something terrible, or something wonderful, or maybe both, that would provide me with a key, or a hint at least, to the story of their love and separation. Or so I sensed, but the truth was far-off to me then. Little did I know how far. Nor did I realize how long it would take me once I began to dig.
PART II
Anna, circa 1934, found in an old wallet of Armand’s.
Armand in 1937, the year after he met Anna.
CHAPTER EIGHT
MY TRIP TO ALBA WITH MY GRANDMOTHER and the summer I spent there in 2001 left me feeling spooked and embarrassed about my strange, immature obsession, and for a time, I tried to convince myself that there was more to life than my grandparents’ story. But even as I resolved to follow my own path, Armand and Anna exerted an undeniable influence over my decisions. Switching out of medieval studies (away from the house) and into early modern history was, I told myself, a dispassionate choice. I was interested in the origins of political ideology and national identity, and if I studied those topics in France, it was simply a matter of geographical continuity, of linguistic convenience, of the unique historical moment that was the French Revolution. But I just as easily could have chosen England, or Italy, or Germany. France was and wasn’t my grandparents’ home: it was the country where they had met, studied, fallen in love, been hunted and hidden—the country they both regretted and refused to live in, where they’d bought and abandoned an ancient stone ruin. Circuitously but irresistibly, I kept returning to the place my grandmother had picked out for me.
Their influence was not immediately detectable in my thesis topic—Jacobinism in rural France—until you examined a map and noticed that the archives in which I chose to do my research the summer before senior year were in Avignon, which just happened to be an hour south of Alba. Even my accommodations in the Papal City were evidence of my grandmother’s persistent interference in my fate: when she heard I was headed to Avignon, she excitedly recalled that a friend of hers, the poet John Allman, had a close friend there named David Mairowitz, a respected American writer who taught at its university. I ignored this information, but without asking me, she wrote to John to get me an introduction to David. I’d intended to stay in a youth hostel, failing to notice that my research project coincided with the Avignon theater festival, when all lodging in the city is booked months in advance. Thanks to my grandmother, I had a doorstep on which to land when I arrived for the summer. David took pity on me, with my lopsided braids, thrift store tuxedo pants, and rumpled blouse, and let me stay in his guest room. I made it to Alba just once in 2002, for a weekend that I mostly spent trying to fix a broken window in the house, which only made me feel more passionate and protective of the place.
Devoted though I was to doctoral studies and Jacobins, my grandparents’ story seemed more urgent than my chosen field. The French Revolution was over and could wait; Anna and Armand’s adventures, on the other hand, felt burningly alive. The more I contemplated it, the more I felt I had no right to go on with my own life until I had learned what had happened in theirs. Such a love story demanded recording. I thought it wouldn’t take very long, that I could compact the process into a gap year between college and graduate school. Getting to the bottom of their mystery would be a bit like crafting a Penelope tapestry: I would write everything down, present it to my grandparents, and they would cry, “No, that’s not what really happened!” Then the process would begin again, with me running back and forth between them, weaving and unweaving a story that tended asymptotically toward the truth, all the while approaching the zero of their death, but never touching it.
I would go to La Roche because I believed the very act of living there would be a kind of listening, that it would help me see my way to the truth. But there were holes in my plan. Two, to be precise: Anna and Armand. There was no reason to think my grandmother would submit to becoming the protagonist of a tale of love, loss, sadness, and survival; my grandfather promised to be even less cooperative. Nevertheless, I once again asked their permission to live in the house.
Over the phone, my grandfather warned me, as he had before, to steer clear of the drunkards and thieves he was certain populated the village. “I shall draw you a map of the people you can trust, when you come to get the key,” he reassured me.
“So it’s all right? You don’t mind if I go live there?”
“Why not? There are sure to be scorpions,” he added. “It will probably be infested, by now.”
“Of course,” said my grandmother, as if she were merely confirming a plan she’d made herself.
I had gone to visit her in Pearl River; we were walking together in her neighborhood, and Grandma, never one to follow the path laid out for her, cut a corner across the grassy embankment between two sidewalks. When she’d gone half the way, she stopped still. “Just promise me one thing,” she said. I stopped, too, and waited for her to catch her breath. Her trip to France with me had indeed been her last. Now she avoided airplanes and generally strayed no farther than the ShopRite a couple of blocks from her house, or down to the park and the library, and then only by foot.
“What?”
“Don’t come home.”
“Don’t come home? Of course I’m coming home—”
“For my funeral,” she cut in, “or, you know, if something should happen to me. Stay where you are.”
“Don’t say that,” I protested.
“What? I’m in my ninety-first year.” My grandmother was the only woman I have ever known who made herself sound older than she actually was. “I didn’t come to my grandmother’s funeral. I saw her before, and we said what we needed to say to each other. A grave is nothing. Just the ground they put your body in.”
“I guess. But please, I hope you stick around. I’m only going for a year.”
I offered her my arm. She shook me off. “What do I always say?” she reprimanded. “Never help an old person. We need to stay in shape.”
“You’re in great shape,” I countered, as if I could change her mind about being old. “Look at you. You get around just fine. You still do your yoga.”
She flicked these observations aside with a wave of her hand. “My eyes are going.” She’d stopped under some oak trees, and the afternoon sun filtered through the branches and lit the leaves as if from within. I wondered what she saw, or did not see, with her aging eyes. “Four-leaf clovers,” she replied, as if I’d asked the question aloud. “You know I used to find them all the time.”
I nodded, thinking of my grandfather and that handful of clovers I’d tried to give him. I also remembered a winter visit to my grandmother when I was four or five. Grandma had let me go outside to play in the snow on my own, and I had stepped right out of my galoshes, which were too big for me, and kept moving through the snow in my stocking feet. In the time it took me to realize what had happened, my grandmother had darted outside, swept me up the stairs, stripped off my wet clothes, wrapped me in a wool blanket, and dumped me in front of the woodstove, muttering angrily about frostbite. That eagle eye and that swiftness contributed to the witchiness I so admired in her and that my grandfather found so unsettling.
Grandma still hadn’t moved. “I can’t see them anymore. I can’t see that far.” She sighed, and then she shrugged. “It’s all right, though,” she added. “I know they’re there. I tell myself someone else will find them now.” I looked at her with great love and a little sadness, unmoving and resolute in her neon-splatter-painted denim children’s hat and funny-looking shoes, a pint-sized figurehead on a grassy knoll in the New York suburbs.
Then I looked again. At her feet was a halo of four-leaf clovers, neatly lined up around her toes.
“Grandma!” I exclaimed, kneeling to pick them. I held them out to her, but she pushed my hand away.
“You keep them.” Still clasping my hand, she closed my fingers around them. “It’s your turn for luck. I don’t need them anymore.”
When we got home from our walk, Grandma sat down and rested for all of thirty seconds, then popped out of her chair again. “I have something for you.” She left the room and came back with a three-inch stack of photocopied pages.
“What are these?”
“My refugee files. I ordered them from the Swiss archives. Can you imagine? They kept such records of us, and they still have them.”
“What’s in them?”
Grandma shrugged. “I didn’t look too closely. It brought back memories.”
I flipped through the pages, which blew a little breath of air on my fingers as they settled back into the stack. “Thank you.”
“Sure, well, you’re always asking me questions, and I’m getting too tired to answer them.” Grandma sat down again, heavily this time. “You want something to eat?”
I shook my head.
And then, apropos of nothing, she said, “It’s good you’ll be close to your grandfather. You can keep an eye on him. He needs you.”
In February 2004, when I arrived at my grandfather’s apartment in Geneva to pick up the keys to the house in La Roche, I noticed that the usual perfect order of his apartment seemed subtly disarranged. I had written and phoned to remind him of my arrival time, but he appeared surprised, though not wholly displeased, to see me.
“That’s quite a lot of luggage,” he remarked, with a disapproving gesture at my bag.
Automatically, I assumed his forgetting was a kind of reproof. “It’s for the whole year,” I pointed out.
“Really? Well in that case, I suppose it’s not that much. Would you like some tea?”
“Yes, please.” I trundled my suitcase into the sitting room, taking care to smooth out the scuffs on the green carpet. Usually when I visited, Grandpa placed a neat stack of sheets and blankets on the chair at the end of my bed. This time there was no bedding, just a pile of papers.
Grandpa appeared in the doorway. “I don’t know, Miranda, how you prefer your tea. Do you like it weak, medium, or strong?”
“Medium, please.” I straightened up and smiled. Something about him seemed milder than usual, which put me on my guard.
From the kitchen, I heard him call, “Pardon, I didn’t hear your answer. Weak, medium, or strong?”
“Medium’s fine—I’m just going to wash up.”
“Miranda,” Grandpa summoned.
I hurried back to the kitchen.
“Ah, there you are. Now, how do you like your tea? Weak, medium, strong?”
“However you like,” I replied. Was this some sort of test? “Medium?”
Tea making, once a plain, established ritual, had become strangely chaotic. Grandpa’s electric kettle sat abandoned on the edge of the kitchen windowsill while water boiled down to nothing in a saucepan on the burner. Grandpa chose a tea at random from the cabinet, and I saw that the regiment of carefully labeled jars he’d always kept on his shelf had disbanded into an aimless group of stragglers. “How do you like your—”
“Medium, please.”
“Ah yes”—there was his triumphant slyness—“but is that medium-strong or medium-weak?”
“You choose,” I told him, my worry easing a bit.
“I don’t remember—do you take milk in your tea?”
“Yes, I do, please.”
“I’m not sure if there is any,” he said, looking thoughtful.
“I’ll go and have a look.” I opened the refrigerator and found a mess that confirmed my suspicions. The shelves overflowed with a seemingly endless repetition of the ingredients Grandpa appeared to be buying every day and then forgetting and buying again—Gruyère cheese, endives, butter, olives, eggs, and potatoes, over and over and over again.
I spied an unopened carton of milk in the door, checked the expiration date, and carried it into the kitchen.
“You don’t take sugar in your tea, do you?” Grandpa asked.
“No, no.”
“Milk?”
“It’s right here.” I took two rice-ware bowls from the cabinet and set them on the tray.
“We’ll have tea in the dining room, I think,” he suggested, “if you’d like to bring in the tray.” When we got there, I waited while he moved stacks of papers to the end of the table to clear out a space for us. He looked up. “Do you like milk in your tea, Miranda?”
“It’s here, Grandpa.”
“Ah, yes. I’ll go and get the teapot.”
“It’s here, too.”
“Ah, yes. Silly of me. Sugar?”
“No, thanks.”
“Me, neither.” He looked ruefully at his little bowl of sugar packets, many of them open and half empty, all pilfered from various Geneva cafés.
We sat down.
“May I pour you some tea?”
We sat in silence and sipped. He smiled at me.
“It’s good to be here,” I offered.
“I’m glad you came. How did you get here? I’m sorry I couldn’t come pick you up—perhaps I told you I gave away my car,” he explained. “To a young couple at the UN.”
“Why?” I asked.
He shrugged. “I don’t need it anymore. It’s too much trouble. I’m getting too old to have a car. I can take the train or the plane anywhere I need to go.”
I didn’t know what to say. This was the first time I had ever heard my grandfather admit to aging. We finished our tea in silence, and then I stood up.
“If it’s all right with you, I’m going to clean your refrigerator,” I said, waiting for him to fly into a rage at such a presumptuous proposition.
“If you would like to,” he said. “I don’t think I’ve cleaned it in quite some time.”
I hid a smile. “I don’t think so, either.” Grandpa stood and watched me work for a while, then drifted away to the living room. As I cleaned, I tried to figure out what to do. My grandfather was eighty-eight, and other than a kindly couple across the hall, he had no one to help or look after him. He had alienated nearly everyone in his life. He did not appear to
have any plans for his old age, either. The fact that he was still clean and tidy and put together seemed to be enough for him. How much help was he going to need, and how soon? And how was I going to give it to him? When I had finished with the refrigerator, I went to find him. He was sitting in the living room with a stack of books, staring off into space. “I have to take the trash out,” I announced. “And then I’m going to buy some rubber gloves and some cleaning materials. Also some things to eat for dinner.”
“What for?”
“Well, I’ve been cleaning the refrigerator. It’s really quite filthy.” I choked on my impoliteness, my peremptory tone, my impropriety, but he did not seem to notice. “And now that I’ve thrown out all the rotting and expired food, we don’t have anything to eat.” He looked skeptical. “I’ll show you.” He got up, and we walked to the kitchen.
“I see.” There was a silence. “All of this was from the refrigerator?” He counted the trash bags waiting in the vestibule to be carried downstairs. “You’ve really done quite some work, here, Miranda. I feel really guilty.”
If I’d been surprised Grandpa would admit to aging, I was downright taken aback that he would voluntarily name anything he was feeling. “It’s not your fault,” I reassured him. “You just don’t remember.”
We ended up eating dinner out that night, and I watched my grandfather dither over what to order. He noted his choice on a little piece of paper, slipped the paper into his shirt pocket, noted a different dish on the place mat, and then ordered something else entirely when the waiter came. The night had turned very cold by the time we left the restaurant; I said so, and Grandpa offered me his arm. We moved along in companionable silence.
A Fifty-Year Silence: Love, War, and a Ruined House in France Page 8