I had a copy of my grandmother’s thesis, so I knew she’d presented it in the spring of 1937 and left soon after for postgraduate training at the sanatorium of St. Hilaire du Touvet, near the Haute-Savoie region of France. If she’d still been conducting thesis research in the fall of 1936, the actual paper wouldn’t have been available to proofread until the end of the year at the earliest. The window in which they could have met seemed tiny—maybe six months.
I thought of all those men who’d wanted to marry her, and then of my difficult, diffident grandfather. Had she chosen Armand because he didn’t pursue her? Not that falling in love is really an active choice, I thought, and went searching for more facts to add to my diorama. Were you and Grandpa dating when you left Strasbourg for St. Hilaire? I wrote to Grandma.
While I waited for her answer, I returned to the scene of their meeting: in the lost Strasbourg of my imagination, the plaza near the university was always lit, always full of people spilling out of cafés, scraping seats up to tables balanced tipsily on the cobblestones, their arms flung over the backs of their chairs, arguing, speechifying, playing games, making eyes, saying grandiose things about international politics and the menace of war beyond France’s borders. I conjured Anna and Armand getting to know each other as they worked on that thesis, sitting side by side in the café, leaning toward each other as they went over Armand’s corrections, their eyes meeting perhaps a little more often than was absolutely necessary. Somewhere in that time the distance between their bodies became noticeable, bridgeable.
A sudden, devastating love for Anna—if it was indeed comparable to Swann’s love for Odette, then such devotion and desire must have swept over my grandfather. Swann had made Odette into a work of art in his mind; perhaps Armand had done the same with Anna. Perhaps what made Anna so fascinating to him was that she, like a great work of art, was possessed of a changing beauty. In the photographs in the album on my mother’s shelf, sometimes my grandmother was stunning, so beautiful she didn’t seem real, like a naiad or a dryad or a sylph—one of those unearthly creatures. And sometimes, to the contrary, she seemed somehow too earthy, disturbing, uncontrollable. It was easy to imagine visions of that beauty twisting around in Armand’s mind when things went bad, transforming Anna into the hellion enchantress she was to him now, surging through his life on a sea of hurly-burly and mischief.
My grandmother’s answer to my question seemed like no answer at all, and I sighed with frustration.
In 1937 … a famous “Prof” in whose lab I had volunteered procured for me an unpaid post, but permitting specialization in phthisiology at St. Hilaire du Touvet in the Alpine “massif de la Chartreuse,” down the main road from Grenoble. I spent my 24th birthday in Grenoble invited by the Dentist, only other Jew, a Sephardi from North Africa and colonial France.… We left on an early [funicular], visited old and new parts of the town, had lunch at the Bastille …[the] fanciest and most expensive restaurant in Grenoble … and I wanted to return when Samama [the dentist] said he had counted to see a show with me and spend the night in town.… No way! We had a few sharp words. I returned on my own.
I sighed a second time: if my grandfather flew into a rage every time my grandmother was mentioned, and my grandmother responded to questions about my grandfather by gliding off onto other subjects, how would I ever pin down the facts? Returning to the letter, I realized Grandma had at least given me a hint of an answer to my question: she and Armand must have been dating, but not seriously enough to preclude her being taken out for a fancy lunch with another man. They couldn’t have been terribly attached to each other, I surmised—at least not officially.
With her letter my grandmother had sent more papers. They turned up a single sentence:
My boyfriend, who later became my husband … was a longtime resident of Strasbourg, and so I attempted to find a residency in sanatoria in the region without success.
At that point I did what I usually do when I feel overcome with contradictory thoughts: I called my mother.
As it happened, she had just returned from a visit with my grandmother. “You’ll never guess what’s in Grandma’s living room!” she crowed.
“What?”
“A little silver dish. It’s been hidden in plain sight all these years on the big brass tray she keeps tchotchkes on. Like maybe a coaster you’d put under a very small stemmed glass—or maybe a dish a waiter would bring your change in, I don’t know.”
I had spent hours of my childhood examining those tchotchkes—and asking my grandmother for the stories of their origins—but I had never noticed there was anything special about that tarnished little dish. “Oh yeah, there was a branch of white coral on it that Vladimir brought her from the Red Sea.”
“Yes, and there’s a word stamped inside it. Do you remember that?”
“No.”
“You’ll never believe what it says,” my mother repeated.
“Tell me!”
“ ‘Aubette.’ ”
“What’s that?”
“Grandma said it was from the café where she met your grandfather.”
“What? Really? Did she say anything else?”
“Not a thing. She said she can’t remember why she has it, and then she changed the subject. I couldn’t get her to say anything else about it.”
“Can you imagine? Can you imagine how far it traveled?”
“I guess it survived the war because it was so small. It’s just the size to slip in a pocket.”
“I bet Grandpa stole it,” I wagered.
“That’s true. He has that whole collection of teaspoons.” My grandfather had an elegant set of Georg Jensen stainless-steel flatware, but all his teaspoons had been snitched from various cafés, restaurants, hotels, and airlines.
“But then how would Grandma have gotten it? Wouldn’t she have had to steal it from him? Do you think she took it when she left him?”
“I don’t know,” my mother owned. “But it certainly says something that they held on to it all those years.”
To me, it said everything: whatever mystery persisted in the particulars, whatever details my grandparents had hidden, lost, forgotten, or obscured, that dish existed. One of them—or both of them—had made sure it survived. A tiny silver dish, carried all over Europe, across the ocean and back: its silence seemed far more eloquent than any love poem I had ever read.
“Do you remember a café called Aubette?” I asked my grandfather, the next time we sat down at his table for our ritual teatime. Silence flooded the room.
“How do you know that name?”
“My grandmother told me …” I lost my nerve. “She says you liked to spend time there, when you were students.” I held my breath.
“Liar,” Grandpa hissed.
“Liar?”
“That’s not where I went. I used to play with Fébus in a place that was much more modest, on the upper floor of one of the buildings that lined the square.”
“With Fébus—not my grandmother.”
“With Fébus, of course. Your grandmother was a lousy chess player.”
“So it’s possible you could have met her in the Aubette?”
“Of course it’s possible,” he sniffed. “Just the kind of pretentious, showy place she would have enjoyed.”
That night, after I had gone to bed, there was a knock on my door.
“Come in,” I called, and my grandfather pushed the door open. He stood at the foot of the bed, his lips pressed together in a thin white line. I waited.
“That woman,” he said. “You must know—that woman …” He trailed off with a strangled, desperate sound. “How could I? How could I have been so foolish?” He tightened his palm into a fist and gestured wildly. “That woman,” he repeated, spitting out the words. “She would love to see me undone. I won’t have it. Do you understand me? I won’t have it.”
CHAPTER TEN
ONE EVENING IN AVIGNON I WANDERED INTO the kitchen to make myself dinner and found David pulling a stockp
ot out of the cupboard. “I’m making soup,” he announced. “I picked up a chicken carcass from the butcher’s. Care to join me?”
“Sure,” I said. “Can I help?”
David handed me some carrots to peel. “I don’t mean to interfere, but don’t you want a little more company? People your own age?”
I shrugged. “Kind of. I guess. I don’t know. I just want to work, I think.”
David cocked his eyebrow. “I don’t know, when I was your age—you just seem awfully serious all the time. Aren’t you lonely?”
“I barely have a year to finish this,” I countered. “And I’ll be in Alba soon anyway. I don’t have much time to meet people.”
“True,” he agreed. “Here, can you chop the celery, too?” He opened the refrigerator. “I don’t know, Miranda, when you talk about your grandparents, who are, what, ninety now?”
I nodded. “More than ninety, actually.”
“Well, more than ninety, long divorced, separated by an entire ocean—what’s extraordinary about them is that they’re more emotionally involved with each other than most married couples who have been living together for that long.” He pulled out the chicken carcass and a bag of onions and set them on the counter. “There’s no room for ‘kind ofs’ with a legacy like that.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, here you are, going off to live by yourself in an old dilapidated house in the Ardèche, and—”
“I love that house,” I interrupted.
“I know you do, but is it enough? Is it strong enough?”
“What does that mean?”
He chopped some onions and added them to the stockpot. “You know I hate psychoanalysts with a passion, but I read somewhere that houses are symbols of the human psyche.” He turned to face me. “What are you going to do once you get to that house? What are you going to do once you figure out where all the feeling comes from? What are you going to do about you? Where’s your love story?”
I couldn’t muster a reply. Even though I had begun to realize I could choose my own way to live, every path I had found led me back to the past. I couldn’t conceive of a better use of my time than waiting for a hint to come booming out of the silent chambers of my grandparents’ memories.
The next time it was dried figs.
“Do you want me to soak them?” I offered, when Grandpa set out figs to eat with our tea.
My grandfather was as particular about his figs as he was about everything else: before eating them, he ran them under warm water and massaged them gently until they regained something of their original shape and consistency. I would never soak my own figs, but with my grandfather, one did not have a choice about such things; I ate them without question and found them good. But this time Grandpa said, “No need,” and I felt a twinge of nostalgia for his fussiness.
We each took a fig. Maybe the seeds between his teeth made a sound like boots crunching over pebbles in the South of France. “I think the first time I ate fresh figs was in the army,” he mused. “We were always hungry.”
“Didn’t they feed you?”
He shook his head. “The food was lousy. And young men are always hungry. It was fall, in the south. There were figs all around.” He finished his fig and held his hands in a circle the size of a large dinner plate. “The chasseurs à pied had big berets, like this, and I remember filling mine with figs to eat.”
“What else happened?”
“Then I lay down under a tree and had a nap.”
“I mean, what else did you do while you were in the army?”
He marched his fingers up and down the table. “That. And I learned to take apart a gun, and put it back together, and clean it.”
“That’s all?”
“More or less.”
“Wasn’t it the war?”
“Yes, but nothing had happened yet. And the Germans were up north, anyway.”
Emboldened, perhaps, by his lenience with regard to the dry figs, I pressed a little further. “Why did you enlist in the south if you lived in Strasbourg?”
“I bicycled down there.”
“You bicycled? Wasn’t that far?”
“I liked cycling,” my grandfather said, taking a sip of his tea. “And when they evacuated Strasbourg, when the war broke out …” He looked off out the window. “The trains and wagons were all crowded … I was able-bodied. It seemed only fair to leave the seats to the people who needed them. And I was curious to see what the city looked like when it was empty.” My grandmother had told me my grandfather had been fighting with his father when they parted ways. Had that been the real reason he hadn’t left with his family? That was a corner of the minefield in which I didn’t dare tread.
To my surprise, my grandfather kept talking. He saw his family off—mother, father, sister-in-law Rose, nephew Paul—on the second of September and waited to leave until the next day, or possibly the next. When the time came, he took his bicycle, attached the panniers, and stood beside his apartment building looking around the empty street. Bits of paper and empty cans rattled down the sidewalk; stray cats mewed; abandoned dogs wandered forlornly in the street. Before he left, he went back upstairs for one last look at his family’s home, now emptied of their most important possessions. Everything else was swathed in dust cloths. The shutters were closed, the stove was cold, and the kitchen was bare, except for the glass crock of pickles Armand’s father put up every year. They were still curing. On impulse, Armand reached up, took the crock off the shelf, and carried it down into the street. He couldn’t possibly take it with him, he realized, but he didn’t want to abandon it, either: he didn’t want to leave anything the German soldiers might enjoy. So he smashed it, lifting it as high over his head as he could and dashing it against the sidewalk. The glass tinkled, and the little pickles rolled everywhere. The ocean smell of brine seeped up into his nose as it sank into the pavement. He thought he heard footsteps, and quickly he straddled his bicycle. He pushed off, then stopped, listening. The sound of footsteps was louder now, closer, accompanied by a little creaking sound. Armand held his breath. An old man in a ragged suit and bedroom slippers emerged from behind a building, pushing a baby carriage. There were two neckties and a tin can on a string around his neck. A pack of sad-looking dogs followed after him, looking hopeful. Spooked, Armand pushed off and biked away as quickly as he could, headed south.
“Why south?” I asked again. I was hoping for a mention of my grandmother, for I knew he’d gone to see her.
“I wanted to join the navy,” Grandpa said. “I didn’t know how easily I got seasick,” he added wryly.
“Why the navy?”
“Because the Germans had a weak navy. Everyone was saying that the war would happen on land, not at sea.” He laughed, full of regret and self-deprecation. “Of course everyone had had the same idea as me, and … how does one say, j’ai traîné les pieds—ah yes, I had dragged my feet to enlist, and the navy was full.” He described the recruiting officer, a large, jovial man who rocked up and down on his feet and smoothed his handsome naval officer’s jacket over his belly and called my grandfather “mon petit.” “Mon petit”—my grandfather imitated the man’s booming voice—“we aren’t even taking fishermen’s sons.” Then the officer wrote the name and address of a friend who was a recruiting officer on a little piece of paper that he tucked into the breast pocket of my grandfather’s jacket and sent him off to Sète, where he signed on with the Chasseurs alpins, an elite infantry in the French Army. In ordinary times, Armand would have learned mountaineering, cross-country skiing, and survival skills—possibly even how to build an igloo—but now the entire French Army was in a confused frenzy of disorganized preparation for a war that wasn’t happening as they’d thought it would, so they all just sat around and waited instead.
This was the opening I’d been anticipating. The trail of my grandparents’ love went cold in St. Hilaire du Touvet, but I knew my grandmother didn’t stay there for very long. In November 1937 she was hir
ed as chief assistant to Dr. Joseph Angirany, the head of a private sanatorium halfway between Lyon and Geneva, in a TB station called Hauteville. I knew from my mother’s blue photo album that he had visited her there and from my grandmother herself that they had taken a vacation together before he enlisted. “Did you go to Hauteville?” I asked.
My grandfather looked startled, as if I’d made a rude and unpleasant noise in the quiet of the dining room. “Whatever do you mean?”
Anna (front row, second from the right) with the staff of the Hauteville sanatorium in 1939. Dr. Angirany is seated beside her, in the center.
“She—my grandmother—I thought—did you go to visit my grandmother in Hauteville?”
“Indeed I did,” Grandpa said haughtily. “Once for my birthday and once when the war started.” He sighed. “She gave me a travel blanket for my birthday, and she berated me when I lost it. Unbearable.” His face darkened, and for a moment I worried he would crush his teacup in his hand. He set it down, though, and snarled, “No one could stand her. Even her precious Dr. Angirany threw her out. Of course, he was an anti-Semite.”
“He was?”
“Everyone knew it.”
“You knew him?”
“Yes.” He leaned toward me. “Not the way she knew him, of course.” He raised his eyebrows. “They had a relationship that was distinctly hors professionnel.”
“What does that mean?”
“I believe you’re old enough to know what that means.”
He poured himself some more tea and glared at me, daring me to ask another question, but I had run out of courage.
Back in Avignon, I looked up the distance. Five hundred kilometers he had bicycled to be with her. More than three hundred miles. I called my grandmother. “Did you expect you’d marry Grandpa, when he came to visit you in Hauteville?”
A Fifty-Year Silence: Love, War, and a Ruined House in France Page 10