For a second I saw the place as he must, a dilapidated pile of stones in an anonymous village, and felt a shiver of trepidation. Then I thought of my grandmother and shook that vision off.
“You can always come back to Avignon if you need to,” he offered as he left. I thanked him, but I had no regrets about leaving Avignon, no doubt in my mind that La Roche was where I wanted to be.
Once David had departed, I sat for a long time on the terrace wall, watching the sun pass over the orangey lichen, green ivy, and shaggy grasses that covered the basalt crystals of La Roche. If I turned my head, I could see the castle peering down at me from atop Alba’s hill, half hidden by trees. The house was scrubbed as clean as it could be, and it was warm enough that having no glass in the windows was no longer a problem, as long as I pushed the furniture out of the way when it rained.
It was a strange responsibility to have taken on, camping out in this wide-open house at more or less constant risk of vandalism. No one ever disturbed the property while I was there, but whenever I left the place for more than a few days, the marauders would return, moving things, upending things, breaking things. The house wasn’t mine, but I didn’t want to abandon it to its fate. Whatever I had come to France to accomplish, I wanted to accomplish here. La Roche, for better or for worse, was my place. For just a second, I felt gigantically happy, sitting on the terrace wall and watching the wind sift through the leaves on the trees by the Escoutay. With no little awe, I remembered my vision, seven years before, upon seeing the house for the first time. This is my heart’s desire, I thought, and I have fulfilled it. It was an extraordinary feeling.
CHAPTER TWELVE
MY EXALTATION LASTED UNTIL THE SUN BEGAN to dip behind the hamlet. Gradually, the shadows edged the light and warmth off the terrace, and I put on my sweater again. Except for the wind, La Roche was utterly silent. If I shouted, no one would hear me. I thought of the broken windows, the rotting terrace door, and the leaking roof; I thought of the fact that the house wasn’t mine and might never be; I thought of the fact that, even if it were, and I did manage to fix any of those things, the place still wouldn’t be comfortable, or even really habitable. The electricity was faulty; there was no hot water in the bathroom; and the inside of the house was a warren of unfinished, dingy, impractical rooms. My happiness deserted me just as abruptly as it had come, and I felt daunted, even frustrated, by the idea that I had actually followed through on this strange desire. What had I been pursuing? What exactly was I expecting to find?
I stood up and hurried out of the house, up the hill to the village, as if I could elude these questions by moving quickly. At a loss for anything else to do, I bought myself a newspaper and walked down to Le Camping.
The terrace was crowded, and Yohann was busy with customers. I ordered a coffee at the bar and took it to an empty table, where I could see the trees, the river, and the castle beyond. I was still alone but surrounded, at least, by the hum of people. I was perusing my paper, feeling nostalgic for afternoons with friends and family, when I heard a chair scrape across from me and looked up. It was Julien, whom I had met on one of the Saturday evenings Grant, his friends, and I had spent at the campground. From that first encounter, I had learned that Julien was a stonemason, had lived in America for a year, attended architectural school and quit, and worked with his father restoring old houses. He made puns that worked only if you were bilingual, and he espoused ferocious political, literary, and architectural opinions. He was tall, wore small wire-framed glasses, and had thick sandy-blond hair and blue-gray eyes. From afar he looked a bit fierce, even warriorlike, but up close, he had a deep, infectious laugh and a smile like a delighted little boy. He reminded me of a Greek statue or an archangel missing his wings.
Now he was standing beside my table with his hand on the back of a chair. “Do you mind if I join you?”
“Not at all.”
Julien sat down, took off his glasses, and rubbed the bridge of his nose, which was speckled with white flecks of lime plaster. “What a day.” He picked up my newspaper and glanced at it. “Am I bothering you? Maybe you wanted to read.”
“No, no, I haven’t really talked to anyone all day. Nice to have some company.” I had wondered, since meeting him, what made him different from the other people I’d met in the village. “Were you born here?” I ventured.
He nodded. “Not far from here—about an hour away, in the high Ardèche. In a commune, actually. My parents are from Paris. Came here in the seventies—back-to-the-land types—you know, Jean Giono and all that.”
“Do they still live in the commune?”
“Nope—it didn’t really work out the way they wanted it to.” He seemed to be considering how much he wanted to tell me. “It’s a long story—it ended badly … direct action, violence, the SAC, that sort of thing …” He trailed off and waved his hand as if to push it all aside. “What about you?”
I told him about the house and my grandparents.
“Yes, but what about you?” he repeated.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, what are you going to do now you’re here? Do you have a job? Are you going to stay?” He had a firm, warm voice that was both humorous and rigorous, and he leaned forward as he asked these questions, fiddling with the spoon that had come with my coffee cup. Then he leaned back and smiled. “You’re a bit of a romantic, no?”
“I have a fellowship from my university. For a year. Then I don’t know.”
“So what are you doing for a year?” He relaxed into the plastic café chair and observed me. He was quite tall, and his legs were stretched along one side of the table. Despite his lounging posture, something about his gaze, or his manner of listening, made me feel as if he could detect the things I wasn’t saying, too. “Figuring out what happened to my grandparents and writing about it. They have an extraordinary story—I mean, it’s always important to know what happened to your family, don’t you think?” I trailed off, worried I sounded defensive.
“Sure,” agreed Julien. “But you can’t live in the past. Not always, at least.”
“You should see my living room. In fact, you should see my whole house.”
He laughed. “I’d like to.” He stretched. “I’ve been sitting here for twenty minutes, and I haven’t even ordered anything. Can I get you a drink?”
“I don’t know—first you call me a romantic, and then you tell me I’m living in the past, and now you want to buy me a drink?”
He waved at Yohann, who started over to our table. “I have nothing against being a romantic,” he declared.
When we’d finished our drinks, Julien gave me a ride back to La Roche, and I showed him around the house. When he saw the warped terrace door and the plastic over the windows, his brow furrowed. “What are you going to do about those?” he asked. “When the summer’s over, I mean.” He squatted down and ran a fingernail over the cement holding the terrace doorframe in place. “This has got to be redone,” he told me, brushing his hair away from his glasses. “You see how the water has been running down and rotting the wood? That’s why it’s warped.”
“I know—I mean, I know I’m going to have to replace the door. I actually have a door,” I added, brightening. “Youssef said he would help me install it when he had the time.”
I led Julien to the tower, where I had stowed the door Grant and I had bought the month before, at Youssef’s urging, from a big home construction warehouse. We’d tied it to the roof of Grant’s borrowed Renault Super 5 with a ball of twine and driven home with me hanging out the window, clinging to the door so the wind wouldn’t push between it and the car and blow us off the road, feeling like The Clampett Family Visits France.
Now Julien stared at the door dubiously. “Did you measure your doorframe?”
“I didn’t have a tape measure. And the door was on sale … Youssef said we should grab it.”
Julien didn’t say anything right away. Though I didn’t recognize it then, I would soon become f
amiliar with the perplexed squint he got on his face when things weren’t logical. “Hang on,” he instructed, and disappeared through the front door, reappearing moments later with a tape measure, which he unrolled against the frame of the door I’d bought. “Two hundred and four by ninety centimeters. Standard.” He walked back out to the terrace and turned to the rotting doorframe. “Eighty-two centimeters. And eighty-three down here.” He hooked the tape measure onto the top of the door’s stone threshold and stood up again. “One hundred sixty-eight centimeters.” He slid the tape measure to the other end of the threshold. “And one hundred seventy point five over here, if you want to split hairs.” The tape measure slid back into its case with a clang whose finality passed the judgment Julien was too discreet to voice.
“But Youssef said—” Even as the words came out of my mouth, I laughed at the mental image of trying to get the door to fit. “I don’t know what he was thinking.”
Julien looked a little aggrieved. “Either Youssef was hallucinating, or he is a far better carpenter than I am.” He hooked the tape measure onto his pocket and sat down on the terrace wall. “You’re going to have to get a door made, I’m sorry to say. But I’ll hang it for you when you do.”
I couldn’t imagine when that would be or how I would find the money for it.
Grandma’s words became my creed—you did just have to talk to people. Soon after I moved in, I walked by the hotel where she and I had eaten lunch when we’d visited Alba in 2001 (and where she thought she’d slept back in 1948) to say hello to the owners. Of course they remembered my grandmother. They wanted to hear all about her and about what I was doing in the village, and when they learned I was trying to get together enough money to pay for doors and windows, they offered me a job cleaning rooms and waitressing at banquets. It wasn’t regular work, but it was a big help.
“Any honest thing you work hard at you should be proud of,” my grandmother replied when I wrote to tell her about my new job. “One of my proudest accomplishments was during the war, picking grapes. We picked grapes for fifty-six days straight, without stopping. They said they’d never seen anyone do that, not even the professional pickers.”
I was familiar with this part of Anna and Armand’s story. Indeed, it figured prominently in my fairy tale of their life together: an evil power had forced a prince and princess from their rightful stations in life, sent them into hiding, and required them to perform impossible tasks. They’d begun on the shores of the sea, moving through a sweaty haze of sun, dust, and cicada buzzing, the bright green vines wavering over the ochre-colored hills and out of sight. They worked with a ragged horde of people, surely dukes, princes, queens, and ladies like themselves, stripped of their names and their pasts, disguised as migrant workers and gypsies, whole thin families of them lined out between the vines on the big estates, the women clipping bunches of grapes and laying them in the narrow metal containers the men carried on their backs, the older children taking care of the younger ones at the edges of the vineyards.
My grandmother loved to tell of the magic that operated in those times, of how the rocky ground became soft as a feather bed when they lay down at the midday rest. Her favorite part was the abandoned castle in which they slept, to my mind a tacit acknowledgment of her hidden royalty. A pile of hay in a tenth-century stone tower with the most beautiful view, Grandma would recount, unbelievable, how beautiful it was. And there again, the magic operated: they were wrapped in a mantle of fatigue, so finely woven they barely noticed the pinprick itch of fleabites as they lay in the hay. At the end of the day, with the breeze coming off the sea, they looked out over the land from the dark of the stone tower and did not know when the end of the story would come or what would happen when it did.
“Hard work,” my grandmother wrote me now. “We were so hungry. We would creep back into the vineyards at the end of the day to pick the fallen grapes, or the green, hard ones still on the vines, and eat them. I weighed ninety pounds at the end of that summer.”
I put down the letter, feeling ashamed of myself. How could I have romanticized months of grueling manual labor, no fixed domicile, and near starvation?
They returned to Madame Flamand after the grape harvest of 1940 but didn’t stay long with her. By the end of the year, they had decided it was too dangerous to keep living there and moved to St. Paul de Fenouillet, a larger market town about ten kilometers to the east. Though the Vichy government was not yet arresting French Jews in any systematic manner, by early 1941 they had begun rounding up foreigners, both Jews and non-Jews, and sending them south to prison camps in the Pyrenees. My grandparents’ legal status, or rather their lack thereof, was more and more of a problem for them, particularly after the Vichy government passed a law in August 1940 forbidding anyone who was not a French national to practice medicine. My grandparents may also have moved to protect Madame Flamand, whose citizenship would have come up for review in 1940, since she was a Spanish refugee and had been naturalized after 1927, one of the cutoff dates the Vichy government used when assessing people’s nationality. Perhaps they had not wanted to draw any undue attention to her.
Anna and Armand moved during one of the rainiest seasons on record in that part of the world, a fact I knew from another of my grandfather’s secret doorways to the past, a small painting he kept hidden in his apartment, pressed inside a book. I had discovered the painting during one of the weekends I spent at his house while attending boarding school. As with all those little symbols, I never knew why he decided to show it to me. One day he pulled a volume from a high shelf and took from it a small, many-colored painting on a piece of thick watercolor paper. It looked like a mosaic, or a window of opaque colored glass, angular forms fitted together in the shape of a shield.
It was a gray day, and the whole of Geneva was filled with a dull, pearly light, which shone into the room where we stood and made the colors in the painting glow as we held it between us.
“Who painted it?” I ventured, finally, when Grandpa didn’t say anything.
“Otto Freundlich. Do you know who that is?”
I shook my head. He took out his dictionary of proper names, found the page, and handed it to me, his finger on the entry. I read the first sentence aloud. “ ‘Freundlich (Otto) Peintre et sculpteur allemand (Stolp, auj. Slupsk, Poméranie 1878—camp de concentration de Lublin-Majdanek, Pologne 1943).’ ” Freundlich (Otto) German painter and sculptor (b. Stolp, a.k.a. Slupsk Pomerania, 1878—d. Lublin-Maidanek concentration camp, Poland, 1943). I finished reading about the man whose painting my grandfather kept hidden in his library and handed the dictionary back to him. He put it away without a word. “Did you know him?”
My grandfather had set the painting on his desk to pull out the dictionary. Now he picked it up again; we stood and looked at it.
“I knew him during the war. I’m not sure how he managed to make it down south from Paris, but he did.”
“How did you meet him? Did you live in the same town?”
“There had been floods in the south, and they washed away a great many roads and small bridges around Caudiès and St. Paul. So after the harvests were over, I got a job with one of the work crews the government assigned to repair them.”
I asked what he’d done on the job.
“I learned to use a shovel. I dug ditches. I mixed mortar.” He held out his hands, which were still, even in old age, thick and strong. “I got calluses.” We inspected his hands. “But they gave us special titles as compensation: I got to be a technicien des ponts et chaussées.” He pointed his nose in the air as he said it, and the whole room pulled itself up around us in mock pomposity. “Bridge and roadway technician, if you please.
“And one day I was working on the road,” Grandpa made a shoveling motion, “and I saw a very tall man coming toward me, with white hair, very striking. There was something so striking about him that I dropped my shovel and walked up to him, holding my hand out like this.” My grandfather reached out and shook my hand, conveying a yo
ung man’s shy admiration.
“Then what happened?”
“Well, I introduced myself, and he introduced himself. He said his name was Otto Freundlich, and he was a painter. We got to be friends. We—I would go and see them quite often, him and his wife, and sometimes they would reciprocate. He gave me the painting—they had destroyed all his paintings, and he was trying to repaint them all.”
“They had destroyed his paintings?”
“They said he was a degenerate artist.”
“What happened to him?”
“Someone denounced him. And they sent him to Maidanek.”
Silence. We went back to the dining room, away from the silence, away from the book and its hidden memory.
“From Caudiès we went to St. Paul de Fenouillet,” my grandmother wrote. “A market town with shops, a doctor, and some nice houses as well as a hotel from where the refugees were lined up for the extermination camps later, and rentals.” They lived in two locations in St. Paul: first, in the winter of 1940, a small room with an open hearth and an iron tripod for cooking, and then, by spring of 1941, a second-floor apartment in a house with a garden for raising food and rabbits, cold running water, a woodstove for heating and cooking, and two upstairs neighbors: “Tante Erna [and] an awfully nice and (Polish) excellent seamstress-tailor. Armand worked at the Cooperative, which allotted agronomic and viticultural products … for the region.”
Erna, circa 1947.
I knew Erna as my grandmother’s best friend and my mother’s godmother, whom we used to visit in St. Gallen, Switzerland, before she died of kidney cancer when I was twelve. When my mother and her brother spent time with their father in Geneva as children, Armand would put them on the train to St. Gallen to visit Erna, and then she would put them on the train back to Geneva. That was about all the contact he could bear with Erna, who was too close to my grandmother for his taste. Once Erna had asked him why he refused to speak to my grandmother. “She talks too much,” he’d declared, and stormed off.
A Fifty-Year Silence: Love, War, and a Ruined House in France Page 13