A Fifty-Year Silence: Love, War, and a Ruined House in France

by Miranda Richmond Mouillot

  “What? Speak up. You know I can’t hear a thing over the phone.”

  I raised my voice and repeated the question. To my surprise, she laughed. “Not really, no. Dr. Angirany was always trying to introduce me to other people. He didn’t like your grandfather. I was a little surprised when he said we should go on vacation together.”

  “Did you share a hotel room?”

  “Of course we did.” From across the ocean, I heard the little creaky birdlike sound she made when there was something unresolved on her mind. Were they thrilled to see each other? Distracted by thoughts of war? Did they feel a bit awkward at first? But that didn’t seem to be the unresolved question. “Patron,” she said. “That’s what we all called him. He threw me out when the Germans came—I always wondered why. Your grandfather said he was an anti-Semite.”

  “Did he say anything to make you think that?”

  “Angirany? No. But why else would he have thrown me out?”

  Dr. Angirany had been my Grandma’s professional role model, her hero, and her champion. “In my later career,” she wrote, “I always compared my skill as a physician to his, and wondered whether I was as good as he was.” The two of them learned new diagnostic skills together, consulted with each other over difficult cases, and coauthored at least one paper. When the war broke out, every other doctor in the sanatorium was drafted, and Anna and Dr. Angirany ran the entire two-hundred-bed hospital by themselves.

  These circumstances alone, I thought, would be enough to make my grandfather wild with jealousy; it was easy to imagine him trying to talk Anna into a bad opinion of her patron when she was sent away. But why had he sent her away? In my room, among the cold stones of Avignon, I tried to picture Anna and Angirany in the winter of 1939, exhausted and never warm enough, making the rounds of their frightened, displaced patients.

  Despite our special allocations as a tubercular hospital everything became more difficult. The winter 1939–1940 was harsh and the “patron” was frequently ill from overwork and too little rest, so was I. My worst task was my mandatory presence at all funerals. We never had any before the war. Prognosis was quite precise and we summoned families of very sick patients and advised them to remove their family member to local facilities so they could be buried in family plots and local cemeteries. [Now], of course, evacuees were the sickest, [and] we had more work with less personnel and many, many losses. All this winter I attended the funerals, representing family and hospital … in freezing rain or snow on the windblown hill cemetery above the village … always a sad ordeal.… To this day I could perform a Catholic burial service and sometimes did so in my dreams.

  A memory returned to me of my grandmother sitting on the back porch of my parents’ house one summer in Asheville and staring into the bottom of a dessert plate, across which was smeared a streak of bloodred raspberry juice. I asked her what she was thinking about, and she said, “I had a patient, a student. A Belgian, a relapse who escaped to France. He survived a firing squad because when the bodies fell, one of them fell on him and they left him for dead. A miracle.” With that word she pushed down hard on those dangerous memories and rushed on. “That winter Dr. Angirany—he was a former tubercular, like me, like most TB specialists—one day he looked at me and pulled me aside into an empty examining room and started unbuttoning his shirt.” She smiled. “I always told him it was my real specialization certificate—he’d been coughing all winter, and he wanted confirmation.”

  I compared this rather incoherent version of the story to the written one I had before me. It was easy to see why my grandfather might have thought she and Angirany were having an affair—surely the idea of a man undressing in front of Anna, particularly someone she so admired, would have made him boil with rage.

  The high point of my collaboration with [Angirany] was when one day, during the first war winter, he asked me to examine him. We were overworked and cared for many more patients than the sanatorium was built to carry because patients from around Paris had been evacuated to our region at the approach of the German troops. The patron started losing weight and coughed. I could hardly believe it when he asked me (and none of the venerable physicians of the other sanatoria) to examine him. I still remember how I was almost touched to tears, and told him that this gesture of his was my real specialization certificate.

  Despite my grandmother’s professional closeness with Dr. Angirany, I could find no evidence of any personal friendship with him. Nor could I find any logical reason for him to send her away. He began urging her to go south when the war broke out, more and more frequently as it became clear France was headed for defeat. “A Jewish assistant didn’t look right” was how my grandmother explained it. “Not really knowing what went on with my fellow Jews, I had never planned to flee, considering my place was with the patients.”

  Fleeing may never have been her intention, but the pressure of the war kept mounting: the Nazis surged through the Ardennes and began pushing toward Paris. One day in June 1940 Anna happened to pass by the house of an acquaintance, a German-Jewish woman named Madame Rollo, who had been renting a cottage in Hauteville. Anna had dined with Madame Rollo and her parents multiple times before the war had made her too busy for socializing.

  I found her, ready, packed to leave for Amélie-les-Bains, where the Paris Government had removed itself, as well as many Embassies and Consulates. She had some extra gas to last for the long journey. She invited me to join her and I did after picking up a few things to take with me.

  It looked like Dr. Angirany hadn’t thrown Anna out; she was the one who decided it was time to go. Moreover, in my grandmother’s Swiss refugee files, I gleaned an interesting fact: Joseph Angirany had my grandmother’s work permit renewed on the very day France capitulated to the Germans. I cannot help but wonder—cannot help but hope—that he pressured her to move south because he feared for her safety. He would have been of an age to remember all too clearly the carnage of the last world war. Perhaps my grandfather’s venomous jealousy was somewhat founded: perhaps Dr. Angirany truly cared for Anna and wished to protect her.

  They must have parted on reasonably good terms because Dr. Angirany promised to send along Anna’s trunks as soon as she had a forwarding address. He must also have promised to forward letters to her; indeed, maybe it is thanks to him that my grandmother and grandfather stayed in touch. However amicable their parting, though, it would have taken superhuman maturity and remove not to feel betrayed and abandoned by her patron for casting her out into chaos.

  The journey, once we hit the main roads in the valley, is dimly remembered. We passed slowly through crowds of Belgian and Northern refugees with many children and old people. Some walking on foot, others in all sorts of cars, carts drawn by asses, horses, mules, and everyone carrying most prominently the gas mask canisters which had been distributed to the population at the outbreak of war. Overhead the constant noise of the German airplanes.

  Where and how we spent the night I can’t remember but do clearly the blackout. Everywhere in trains and roads, streets, only blue light bulbs, even in flashlights, were allowed. On the second day, toward dusk we arrived in Amélie-les-Bains. Streets were ultra crowded, everyone appeared frenzied. We spent the night in the small apartment of [Madame Rollo’s] friends. No lodging was available anywhere. Our hosts were gloomily agitated. Food had become scarce and they had no news of their families. We had to register right away for ration cards. After a day or two I was assigned another residence north of Perpignan because I was Romanian. I was put on a Bus for Perpignan, where I had to change for another bus to Caudiès-de-Fenouillèdes. I remember walking around under a blue sky in unbearable heat dressed in a woolen blue coat (saving thus a garment by wearing it) and often crying in self-pity, while waiting for the right bus. I had very little money, I felt all alone in the world of the South, being a Northerner and mountain-dweller. I was too tired, also hungry and dehydrated to think of the frightening unknown ahead.

  I always had idolized Grandma
, but in Avignon, I began to learn all the reasons there were to worship her, beyond her charm and beauty and intelligence and witchiness. Now I saw the moment in her life when, alone in a place she’d never been, with little money and no resources, she’d rolled up her sleeves and become heroic.

  At this point, Madame Rollo lived with [her mother and stepfather] while trying to get visas through Spain and Portugal for her way to Alexandria Egypt and her husband. Being certain of the Germans’ occupation of all of France, [Madame Rollo’s parents] disappeared into the surrounding mountains to commit suicide, so as not to be in her way. She [came to Caudiès and] appealed to me to help find them.

  By this time, I had learned enough about the war not to be shocked by this fact; indeed, my grandfather had translated an entire book about suicides related to the political situation in Austria and Germany in the late thirties and early forties. My grandmother, with her usual resourcefulness, found the nearest army unit.

  I approached the Commandant of the Senegalese troops, who were, at the time, stationed in the region awaiting their return to Africa.…[They] willingly sent several groups into the hills in all directions to search for the old couple. One group found them and brought them into the village. The woman was dead, the man in a coma but still breathing. A burial ground and hospital were needed, only to be found farther [away] in Perpignan. The daughter …[took] it for granted that I’d accompany her, which I did.

  My grandmother’s matter-of-fact tone, I thought, very nearly hid the astonishing bravery of this act. “The transport of dead people by unauthorized persons,” she noted dispassionately, “was punishable by law, as I well knew.” Had they been discovered, Anna and Madame Rollo would have been arrested and deported immediately. Nothing daunted, Anna had the Senegalese soldiers carry Madame Rollo’s parents to the waiting car.

  The stepfather, whose breathing was obvious, sat next to her. I was in back, with the pale, dead body propped up, and made efforts the whole way to keep it thus.… All along the route …[were] numerous checkpoints … where gendarmes asked questions, and looked into the car and trunk. I did all the explanations: I was a physician and we were on our way to a hospital to help these obviously very sick and dying old people. Miracle! They let us pass each time.

  When they arrived in Perpignan, Madame Rollo learned that her Egyptian visa had been granted and was faced with a dilemma she found unbearable: she could depart and abandon her parents, or stay by their sides and risk deportation herself. Because they were foreigners, my grandmother wrote,

  The only hospital available to us was a very miserable one set up on the edge of town for the influx of Republican Spanish refugees during the Spanish Civil War and the debacle which followed Franco’s victory.… Upon arrival … the woman was declared dead and burial permit granted. The man, without regaining consciousness, died the next day.

  My grandmother did not say whether Madame Rollo hesitated and had to be pushed to save her own skin, or whether she abandoned my grandmother and her parents without a backward glance. Nevertheless, “I stayed to see both her parents buried in the cemetery reserved for foreigners and Spanish refugees, in a bleak field not far from the hospital. I never saw or heard from the daughter again.” I considered searching for Madame Rollo, but did not know where to even begin; my grandmother could not remember the exact spelling of her surname, let alone her given name. But Grandma took the unsatisfying end to this story for granted—what was one more fate among all the ones she had resigned herself to never knowing?

  I remembered a taxi ride from Alba during the summer I’d spent there: the driver, a local man, had asked what I was doing in the Ardèche. I gave him a brief explanation, and he inquired, “When did your grandparents go to America?”

  “After the war.”

  “Where were they during the war?”

  “Here in France, in hiding. They fled to Switzerland in ’forty-two. My family’s Jewish.”

  “My family hid Jews during the war.”

  “Where?”

  “Here.” He gestured outside the taxi. “In the barn, first, then in the attic. I used to bring them food. I remember a family from Lyon with a boy my age. They got out. They moved on, I mean. Don’t know what happened to them—always wondered. We never heard from them again.” We were silent. Anything could have happened to them, we both knew. “I think about them a lot. I like to imagine them in America.” He brightened. “Like you.”

  “Well, it’s because of people like your family that people like my family survived.”

  Chance encounters like his, or like my grandmother’s with Madame Rollo, were incidental, anecdotal, anonymous drops in the rainstorm of history. Among so many raindrops, what was the point of lingering over Armand and Anna? Maybe a half century of silence was incidental, too—even to them, unremarkable in a life full of incompletion. But then I thought of the glance I’d exchanged with the taxi driver, both of us slightly awed at the way unfinished business is sometimes partially laid to rest, a long time later, by other people—two loose threads picked up and tied together, across a hole that nothing could ever fill.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  APRIL CAME AND WARMED THE STREETS OF AVIGNON. In the sun, on certain days, it almost felt like summer, and I decided it was high time to go to Alba. As it happened, a friend of mine from Asheville was teaching English in a high school an hour north of Alba, and he offered to help me open the house. So when Grant’s classes let out for spring break, he met me in the train station in Montélimar, and we took the bus to Alba, or rather to the bus stop about a mile and a half away from the village. From afar, the castle and La Roche looked particularly fantastical and imposing in the orange-tinted late-afternoon light, and I felt gleeful and proud to show him the house.

  But Shakespeare was right about April’s uncertain glory. As soon as we walked under the archway to the rue de la Double, the quiet strangeness of the place struck me. Unlike Avignon, where the sun had melted all but the slightest of chills, La Roche felt as if it had accumulated a winter’s worth of dark and cold and was hanging on to them grimly. The contrast from the sunny parking lot we had just crossed was so stark, it felt as if we were dropping down a well. When we got to the house, I scraped the cobwebs off the doorknob and pushed the door open across the uneven stones, breathing in the sweet, slightly mineral scent of the abandoned house.

  It was late afternoon, and the daylight was fading fast; we walked down the dim, gray-green hall and tried to get our bearings. I felt a strong wind hit me and heard Grant call out. When I stepped over the threshold into the back room, I saw that all its windows had been smashed. So much debris had blown through the jagged, empty frames that it looked like the back garden had staggered in and died all over the floor: everything was carpeted in dead leaves and vines, dirt and stones.

  “It must have been kids,” Grant speculated, picking up a rock and turning it over in his hands. He held it out to me, and I took it and dropped it onto the floor again, kicking it away from me as if I could punish someone with the action.

  We realized there wasn’t anything we’d be able to do about it that night, so we bolted the door and went back to the front room.

  “We can do this,” I affirmed.

  Grant nodded. “It’s not that bad.”

  I regretted my decision not to buy a sleeping bag. We kept ourselves warm by cleaning and reduced the level of filth to the point that we didn’t shudder when we touched things. We sat down to a cold dinner of cereal, milk, and bananas, which felt even colder once we realized the gas tank for the kitchen stove wasn’t empty. Then we pulled the curlicued metal bedstead to the center of the room, as if by doing so we could escape the cool seeping in through the walls or imagine a fire in the sooty, abandoned fireplace. Grant climbed into his sleeping bag, and I wrapped my down vest around my feet and pulled Grant’s coat over my shoulders. I was still freezing. It was so cold that the air seemed colored by it, as if the room were unable to absorb the chill. Unable to sleep, I
stared into the dark and thought about my grandmother, lost in the chaos of the capitulation, looking for a place to stay.

  I was dumped into the Village Square and handed the paper given me in Amélie-les-Bains to the Gendarme who met me. Everyone around viewed me with suspicion. The Gendarme, with a grim smile, informed me that nowhere was a room to be had and I better not camp out. What to do?!

  I believe it was the village priest, present in the square at the time, who advised me to try the Veuve Flamand. This pertained to a café in a sidestreet whereto I was directed. Below street level, I entered an empty long room, dimly lit, with rows of tables and chairs along the walls. It was cool and I was exhausted. Mme. Flamand met me and I explained my presence. She was short, rotund, wearing dark clothes. Her face was round-squarish, riddled with smallpox scars, her eyes were brown and shrewd. Knowing the history of the disease which scarred her face for life, I recognized a survivor in front of me. She interrogated me tightly while also telling me much about herself. She was a Republican Spaniard who had worked in France … and had married old “drunkard” Flamand to get the house with café and some small landholdings.… She didn’t believe I was a physician. Certainly I didn’t look like one in my disheveled, exhausted state. She never mentioned her disbelief, but I knew. Finally after I had a cool refreshing drink, she said she only had an attic room she could let me have, but she didn’t think it would be suitable. I asked to see it. Two flights up, the last dusty and dirty beyond belief At the top a rickety door, poorly closing, giving into a room with a large window closed and shuttered, over the street below. Mme. F. opened window and shutters to reveal a thickness of dust inches deep covering the floor and every other surface. A rusty metal frame bed with mattress and what looked like rags heaped on it. A washstand on a primitive half table, a chair, completed the room’s furnishings. Mme. F. with a broad smile questioned me without words. This was it or spending the night where?