“I hope you find the bed comfortable,” Grandpa said, as if he had been meditating upon the matter for quite some time.
“Of course. I love that bed. It’s like an old friend.”
“Really?” Grandpa’s voice sounded as if I had said something truly bizarre.
“Well, I’ve been sleeping there since I was a child,” I reminded him.
“Really?”
“I slept there every weekend when I was at the International School.” I felt a small, thready sensation of alarm.
“But where did we meet?” That was Grandpa the gentleman, puzzled, but always polite, always patient with strangers.
“Do you remember who I am?”
He shook his head.
“I’m your granddaughter.”
He stopped and looked at me.
“Do you know who my mother is?” I turned my face to him. How cold it is outside, how bitterly cold, I thought. I wanted to keep going, but he held me still, my arm tucked firmly into the crook of his own. “Angèle,” I told him, “I’m Angèle’s daughter.”
His blue eyes grew wide and sad. “Of course. Tu vois? Tu vois comme je suis devenu idiot.” We started walking again. When we got home, we wished each other goodnight, and I sat down on my little bed and cried. I would have given anything to have my bitchy old grandfather back.
The next morning I awoke to a quiet apartment. I could hear my grandfather’s radio murmuring from his bedroom, so, timidly, I knocked on his door. “Come in,” he called. I opened the door and realized I had never seen my grandfather supine. He smiled at me, the old cautious smile and soulful blue eyes. “Ah, Miranda.”
I felt such tremendous relief, I thought I might turn into water. “You remember who I am?”
He looked mildly offended—wonderful! “Of course I do,” he remonstrated. “I may be getting old, but I’m not so doddering as all that.”
I spent the next few days in a flurry of phone calls to various senior citizens’ service providers. I arranged for a visit from the social worker in charge of retirees’ affairs at the UN, and my grandfather received her cordially. He accepted the pamphlets she handed him about retirement planning, assisted living, and home health aides, offered her tea repeatedly, and shook her hand twice as she was leaving. “She seemed quite pleasant,” he remarked when she was gone. “But I can’t imagine what she thinks I need all this for.” He indicated the pamphlets.
I proceeded with caution. “You’ve been having some trouble with your memory.”
“I know that. But it’s hardly a reason to treat me like an old schnook.”
I didn’t answer. If he couldn’t keep track of tea and groceries, what was next? What else would slip away?
My grandfather did not seem bothered by such questions at all. “Did you see I rearranged my library?”
“No, I hadn’t noticed.” My grandfather had so many books, he had to store them in double rows on his bookshelves, except in the dining room, where he kept a wall of white shelves only partially full, a promise to himself that there would always be room for more.
“Well, not the whole library,” he amended. “I just rearranged the shelf behind you.”
He gave me a little tour of the books there, explaining how he’d placed his leather-bound editions of Lessing and Mendelssohn side by side, since the two men had been friends in real life. I ran my hands over the gold-embossed spines. On the next shelf I saw an anthology of contemporary poetry whose brightly colored paper cover clashed with the other volumes around it. I picked it up and thumbed through it.
“Which is that one?” my grandfather inquired. I handed it to him.
“Oh, yes,” he said. “I bought that in a St. Pancras bookshop because of the name of one of the poets.”
“Which one?”
He smiled. This was exactly the kind of guessing game he liked. “Which do you think?”
I looked through the list of authors. None of them seemed familiar. I shook my head. “I don’t know.”
He pointed to a name: “Fraenkel.”
“Who was he?”
My grandfather closed the book and put it away. “I had a friend by the same name. Fébus Fraenkel. An Austro-Hungarian medical student. He played chess—he made money by writing chess problems, actually. A truly extraordinary chess player. We used to play together. He’d let me open with one extra move. A clever man.” He sighed. “He’s the person who introduced me to your grandmother.”
“Really?”
He nodded.
“When was this? When did you and … my grandmother meet?” Grandpa had by now acquired the faraway look on his face that often preceded his rages about my grandmother, and I tensed, waiting for the inevitable explosion.
“In the mid-thirties.”
“Nineteen thirty-five? Thirty-six?”
“I don’t remember. It must have been after 1935—I had entered the university. She wanted me to edit her thesis.” He went silent.
“Did you?”
“A bit.”
“How did your friend introduce you?”
“Oh, Fraenkel was very clever—very clever. Much cleverer than I—if I had known … He was looking to get rid of her, you see.”
“And?”
“Well, he knew he could escape her clutches more painlessly if she had someone else to latch on to. Quite the dirty trick, no?”
I wasn’t sure what to say.
“I was very naïve at the time. Have you read Proust?”
I nodded, feeling a little wounded. “Of course I have—you used to read Proust to me.”
“Really?”
“Right here at the dining room table. You’d give me linden tea and madeleines and read aloud to me.”
He looked pleased with himself. “How clever of me.”
This wasn’t the first time he’d compared his affair with my grandmother to that of Swann and Odette, and I’d already searched Swann’s Way for passages that seemed pertinent:
He was introduced … by one of his old friends, who had spoken of her as stunning, a woman with whom he might be able to start something up, but he had made her out to be more unattainable than she really was, so that his introducing them would seem even nicer than it really was.
“Did she look like Odette?”
“Who?”
I tried again. “What was she like? What did you like about her?”
“She had beautiful hair. Coal black. Pale, white skin. Blue eyes.”
“Like Snow White?”
“Yes. Like Snow White.”
We were both silent. Eventually, my grandfather’s dry, clean voice startled me away from my thoughts. “Does she visit you, Seraphina?” I looked up. He leaned forward. “I call her that as an ironic nickname, you know.”
At least that’s one thing he hasn’t forgotten, I thought. His voice had taken on that dangerous edge I knew so well, but this time relief mixed with the nervous tension that gripped me when he skated to the edge of a rage about my grandmother.
“Does she still visit you, Miranda?” Grandpa queried again.
I chose my words carefully. “She’s getting older, too. It’s difficult for her to travel.”
He puffed on his pipe, which made the dining room smell rich and warm. “You don’t have much to do with her, do you?”
I shifted in my seat, tucking my feet onto the beam in the middle of the table. “I write to her,” I replied warily. “I see her.”
His voice was wound tight as thread on a spool: “You don’t know her as I do.”
“No,” I conceded, feeling the limpid beauty of his airy apartment constrict around us. “I don’t think I do.”
“I should have known even then.”
“Known what?”
He gave me a baleful stare. “Once I came to fetch her to go work on the thesis. And she wouldn’t let me into her room. She just stuck her head out and said, ‘Wait,’ ” he adopted the high, mincing voice he used when imitating her. “Then she closed the door aga
in. So I waited, and I heard noises, and then she sidled out a crack in the door—like a crab,” he waved imaginary pincers, “and closed it behind her, and smiled,” his mouth formed a treacly smile, “and said, ‘We can go now.’ ”
“What does that mean?”
“It means,” he said, leaning across the dining room table again and looking over his glasses at me, his pale blue eyes wide with anger, “it means she was hiding a man in there.”
CHAPTER NINE
SINCE THE HOUSE IN LA ROCHE HAD NO HEAT, I returned to the guest room in David’s apartment in Avignon, which he had offered to rent me if I ever wanted a place to stay. I would live there until the weather got warm enough to move to Alba, I decided. Initially, I thought I would use the cold months to sort out what I did and didn’t know about my grandparents, to begin sketching out their stories and figure out what questions I needed—and dared—to ask them. My temporary new home, with its tall windows and crowded bookshelves and richly colored carpets, felt like a reprieve from my nascent worries about my grandfather—and it offered the additional advantage of being an easy train ride to Geneva.
The U-shaped apartment occupied the entire floor of a building in a neighborhood just inside the rampart walls of the old city. I inhabited one leg of the U, with a bathroom and an office to myself. It was exactly what Virginia Woolf meant by a room of one’s own, a beautiful, quiet space in which to write—and just as important, in which to be myself unhindered by the outside world.
When David wasn’t off consulting with radio stations in former Soviet bloc countries, unearthing odd facts about dictators, collaborating on opera libretti, or collecting prizes in Italy, he would retreat to his half of the apartment and write. We gave each other a wide berth and avoided chitchat, but in the kitchen, our common territory, we developed an odd kind of intimacy. David wasn’t my professor, my peer, or my mentor, and he did not try to be any of those things. As a result, he became a little of all three. He gave me books on the era I was researching, listened to me musing about my grandparents’ past, and read drafts of my first book chapters. I observed the discipline and rigor he applied to his own work and tried to follow his example. I didn’t know anyone else in the city, but it didn’t matter to me. I was there to write. In many ways, I didn’t feel as if I was living in an actual place. France felt like a giant mnemonic device to me: if Fébus Fraenkel and the date of my grandparents’ first meeting could pop out from a random book on my grandfather’s shelf, I had to be constantly listening, constantly vigilant, on the lookout for even the tiniest hint.
In Avignon, the breadth of my ignorance dawned on me: I knew almost no facts, no chronology, no geography. I tried to sketch a timeline of my grandparents’ relationship and realized I didn’t even know what year they had been married. As if she’d foreseen this snag in my plans, my grandmother sent me a package the week I arrived with a collection of her notebooks and loose papers. “I thought you might find these helpful,” she wrote. The stories and essays, most of which she had written in creative writing classes at her local senior center, were arranged in no particular order, and she’d included multiple drafts and copies of the same pieces. If Grandma’s spoken words were a river, her writing resembled a dense jungle of information, only some of which had anything to do with the questions I was interested in answering. I read it all, hoping for a glimpse of my grandfather, or at least a glimpse of an empty space or silence where he might have fit.
My grandmother began medical school in Strasbourg in 1931, at the age of eighteen.
I loved it. There was a very active and intense cultural life.… During my time in Strasbourg I attended Wagner’s whole Nibelungen.… Every spring the English Shakespeare plays, concerts, theaters galore, to have my fill when, I initially dreamed, I’ll practice in my grandmother’s village or nearby.
Interwar France was a heady place to be young, though its freedom, creativity, and tolerance were tinged, even in my grandmother’s memory, with the darkness that was to come:
I did so well in pharmacology that the examining professor invited me to join his research lab. It never came to be as Hitler had already started to raise his head, and we saw Jewish students crossing the Rhine, seeking refuge. For a few days I hid a [male] Jewish medical student in my room at night. Females were allowed to visit, but even fathers or brothers weren’t allowed in the rooms.
Reading this, I recalled my grandfather hissing, “She was hiding a man in there.” I wondered if he was suffering from a seventy-year-old misunderstanding. Nevertheless, I began to comprehend his seething jealousy. Not only was he completely absent from her writing, he appeared to have had a lot of competition.
One paragraph meandered through an argument with a bacteriology instructor who had failed her for helping another student, a man named Rosenfeld, who passed the course thanks to Anna’s assistance, and ended with a proposal: “In our graduation year he asked me to marry him and settle in Montreal.” I couldn’t help wondering if she regretted declining Rosenfeld’s offer and the safety she could have had with him across the ocean in Canada, or any of the others she’d turned down, for that matter: the son of the Egyptian consul, for example, or an Indo-Chinese student she’d met at a Sunday afternoon tea.
I combed through her accounts of classes and suitors and social events, looking for an opportunity for my grandparents to have met during the year she wrote her thesis, but it seemed to me they barely would have had time for a cup of coffee. In her last year in medical school, Anna traveled to England to represent her lab director at an academic conference (where, she loved to tell me, everyone compared her to Princess Marie of Romania) and made her last journey home to do research for the dissertation her M.D. program required, the legendary train ride on which she’d told the traveling salesmen their fortunes. Upon her return to France, “A particularly vicious pneumonia with very high fever sent me to the hospital, where, I was told later, I spent the first week in a semi-coma, in isolation, with no visitors allowed.” Her friends, inquiring about her at the hospital reception desk, were given a prognosis so gloomy that they took up a collection for a funeral wreath, a fact my grandmother found endlessly amusing. “Only the presentation of my doctoral thesis was delayed,” she exulted. Possibly because I was feeling rather discouraged myself, I imagined my grandfather walking disconsolately home from the hospital and dropping a coin into the collection box for that flower arrangement. And if he (or I) had hoped that her convalescence would afford some time for them to spend together, further reading revealed that Anna had gone on a rest cure in the mountains once she was released from the hospital.
The lack of concrete evidence of my grandfather’s presence in her life only reinforced my belief that the best way to uncover my grandparents’ secret was to imagine my way into it. I identified with my grandmother so deeply, and I knew my grandfather so well, that I was sure I could figure out what had happened, if I only could set all the facts around me like one of those Kleenex box dioramas I’d made when I was a child.
By letter, Grandma answered my questions in her usual sideways fashion. “I forgot in which medical year I met your grandfather but know where. In a very popular café for students not far from the university.” She mentioned in passing that he was taking German literature courses at the university, despite not having earned his baccalaureate—a war profiteer, I remembered her calling him, since he’d later managed to get a university degree through a refugee aid program in Switzerland without ever finishing high school. A joke to her; an insult to him. “When I became friends with Armand … I started research for my doctorate [and] he helped,” Grandma owned, “but not as much as Prof. Larousse.”
I pictured Armand and Anna sitting and staring at each other surreptitiously in the din of a big café. He would have been annoyed by her expansive, candid chattiness; she intrigued and exasperated by his reticence and his scrupulous attention to every word he chose. The more I thought about it, the less I believed it was, as my mother had said to
me when I was thirteen, simply electric. Or rather, I suspected the electricity had been there only as an undercurrent.
They disliked each other on sight, I decided. It was the autumn of 1936, and Anna had bold eyes and a smile she directed at you like a search lamp; her black hair would have been pulled into a loose bun at the nape of her neck, just ready to unravel. It would have taken her some time to sit down, since she would have stopped to say hello to half a dozen people, giving everyone her lit-up smile, or creasing her forehead into a worried pucker, or laughing in a manner Armand would have mistrusted.
Armand would have been sitting with his friend Fraenkel, waiting for Fraenkel to finish his conversation so they could start their chess game; perhaps Fraenkel was talking politics, and Armand was not in the mood for sincere, high-minded discussions. He didn’t have much repartee; he would have sat quietly, smiling a little when someone turned toward him to include him in the talk. He would have had trouble not looking at her. Every time she spoke I bet he stole a glance around the table to see what the others thought of her, half-hoping someone would catch his eye to share a bit in his disdain.
Anna would have noticed Armand staring—she always noticed someone staring at her—and noted how he was making a show of ignoring the things she said. Anna liked a joke that was on her, so maybe she told the story about the time she got arrested in a cabaret for laughing too loudly. Then Armand would have murmured something snide to Fraenkel—“It seems her charm is so formidable it requires an officer of the law to be appreciated safely”—and Fraenkel would have introduced them.
Grandma, of course, revealed nothing of this sort. In her letter, she’d abandoned my grandfather almost immediately for her thesis adviser, Professor Larousse, concluding with an enigmatic memory: “Because he was ‘fiévreux’ I went evenings to his home and this became an intense period of learning in all sorts of ways for me.” Again, I couldn’t help sympathizing with my grandfather’s wild insecurity over my grandmother’s affections.
A Fifty-Year Silence: Love, War, and a Ruined House in France Page 9