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

by Miranda Richmond Mouillot

  On my next visit to Geneva, I asked, “What other work did you do during the war, after you were demobilized? Did you spend the whole time working on the roads?”

  “No—only that first spring in St. Paul de Fenouillet.”

  “Grandma—my grandmother—said you worked in an agricultural cooperative,” I ventured.

  “Did she?” Grandpa’s face took on its dangerous look, and I regretted having mentioned her. “I did. I was even the nominal head of the cooperative. But do you know the thing about the agricultural cooperative?”

  I shook my head, no.

  “I was its only member. Its only employee.” His tone had become supercilious, aggressive. “So you see it couldn’t last.”

  This didn’t make sense to me, but I was afraid to pursue the subject further. “What else did you do?”

  “This and that. Whatever I could. I worked in a workshop that made nuts and bolts. I made brooms, for a traveling broom salesman. He was supposed to bring us the materials, which we paid a small price for, and then come back and collect the brooms, to sell them, and then bring us the money.” He smiled ruefully. “But as you can imagine, he didn’t. Then for a while I had work as an accountant with a merchant who sold a lot of things on the black market—ham, and chocolate, and so on—which he never shared with us, of course. But times were very hard, you know. He couldn’t keep me on. Or so he said.”

  “Did my grandmother work?”

  “No. She didn’t have a job. She stayed home,” he said dismissively, standing up. “She went looking for food, she worked in the garden, took care of the rabbits, she kept the house. I don’t know. I’m going to make some tea. Would you like some?”

  “Yes please.” My grandmother had described that second apartment to me:

  Our furniture consisted of a kitchen table, two chairs, and a small chest for the very few cooking utensils, cutlery, and dishes we possessed. Much was kept in boxes. In our bedroom, we had a somewhat larger than a single bed and the second room held our clothes suspended on strings or kept in suitcases. We also stored supplies there of whatever we could get as food shortages grew daily.

  Grandma spent endless hours looking for food, sometimes biking a whole day’s journey into the mountains, only to return with a single egg for dinner. Her new place had a garden and room for rabbit cages, which eased their hunger a little. Just as important, it offered companionship in the form of those upstairs neighbors. My grandmother’s friendship with Erna ultimately would save my grandparents’ lives, but in the spring of 1941 in St. Paul, Grandma already felt it was a godsend. Despite (or perhaps because of) the presence of my grandfather, her loneliness must have been colossal, having fled her position in Hauteville and been stripped of the legal right to practice medicine, her one great calling.

  Then their landlord found a wild baby rabbit and brought it home.

  I sort of fell in love with this tiny creature and proposed to take it in and [see] if it could be tamed. I found a feeding bottle and rubber nipple and fed it first milk, which it sucked well, adding gradually grasses and twigs for its growing teeth. It grew and got fat. We named it Zigomar. I invented the name because the sounds pleased me.… Zigomar became tame, following, looking at us, as if he knew who we were and playful. We kept him strictly in the kitchen …[which] became too restricted, and he tried to escape each time the … door was opened. Thus he met a premature and accidental death when he somehow slipped under a moving foot and was crushed. We truly mourned him.

  My grandfather called me from the kitchen.

  “Would you mind coming in here?”

  “Of course not.” An acrid smell of burnt plastic hung in the air, and I went to open the window. Grandpa held up his electric teakettle. “Something happened to it—it doesn’t work anymore.” The bottom of the kettle had melted into a ghoulish smile. “See,” he put it on the little three-burner gas stovetop in his kitchen, “when I put it on the stove, there’s the strangest smell—”

  “Grandpa, don’t!” I exclaimed. I pulled the kettle off the flame.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “It—it doesn’t work anymore. Why don’t we go out and get you a new one?” I placed the metal cover on the stovetop and switched off the gas, and then we put on our jackets and took the elevator down to the lobby. “Shall we walk or take the bus?” I queried as we stepped outside.

  “I think we should walk, if you feel you’re up to it,” Grandpa suggested. “Are you in good shape?”

  I hid a smile. “I should be asking you that question.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, you’re going to be ninety next summer.”

  “Are you sure? What year is it?”

  I told him, and he calculated. “Indeed I am. A regular Methuselah.”

  At the store, I picked out an electric hot plate and a kettle with a safety shutoff.

  “Is this for you?” Grandpa asked in the checkout line.

  “In a manner of speaking.”

  “I see.”

  When we got home from the store, my grandfather went to sit down while I disconnected the gas and set up his new kitchen appliances. A piece of paper had fallen behind the gas tank, and I reached back to retrieve it, hoping it wasn’t anything important. It was the stub of an electricity bill. Grandpa had noted the date he’d paid it, a year before. Beside the date he had scribbled, “C’est comme si un clapet se fermait sur ma mémoire.” (It’s as if a valve were closing over my memory.)

  “What’s all this?” Grandpa stood in the kitchen doorway and pointed at the hot plate and the kettle.

  I slipped the paper in my pocket and smiled at him. “New kitchen appliances.”

  “What was wrong with the old ones?”

  I hesitated, not wanting to make him feel I was infantilizing him. “You know, gas is dangerous in apartment buildings. I think it might be against the rules.”

  He ran his hand over the sleek white kettle. “I don’t know how to use this.”

  “It’s very simple.” I showed him the button you pushed to get the water to boil and explained about the automatic shutoff.

  “I see you’re intent on ushering me into the modern age,” he observed. “Well, let me make some tea and see how I like it.”

  I set the table while he measured tea into the teapot. Beside the box where he usually kept tea biscuits I found another scrap of paper. On it, he had written, “Ma mémoire = ma passoire.” (My memory = my sieve.)

  I decided to show him this piece of paper. He smiled when he saw it. “I can’t remember who said that. Ironic, isn’t it?”

  I nodded, moved by the gentleness this new weakness seemed to engender in my grandfather. Again, I felt a tug of urgency: I had to gather his memories before they disappeared. “Do you remember St. Paul de Fenouillet?”

  He nodded. To my surprise, he looked pleased to be talking about the past, as if he were happy to find himself on terrain that didn’t involve knowing what was in the refrigerator or operating fancy kettles.

  “Do you remember raising rabbits?”

  “How do you know all these things, Miranda?”

  “I think they’re important,” I stuttered, not wanting to ruin the moment by mentioning my grandmother but knowing I would have to sooner or later. “You’re my grandfather, after all. It’s—it’s our history.”

  “Hardly fascinating,” he protested, but he was still smiling.

  “Do you remember the little wild rabbit that lived inside the house with you and—and my grandmother? She says the villagers thought she was a witch because it followed her around all the time.”

  The smile snapped off Grandpa’s face, and he looked just like old times. I braced myself. “I’ll say it followed her around,” he sneered. “Do you know how it died?”

  “It was crushed to death, wasn’t it?”

  “Excellent use of the passive voice. Excellent.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She stepped on it. Didn’t see it had hopped up be
hind her.” There was a nasty, metallic clang to his words, as if he were slamming them on the table one by one.

  I was horrified.

  “She was inconsolable,” he conceded, sounding just barely apologetic for his meanness.

  I stared at him, speculating about how my grandmother might first have perceived the harshness I’d always known in him, whether it had insinuated itself into their relationship as water infiltrates a stone wall or shot out like a lance when the pressure of the war began to build. I turned my gaze away before he noticed and pulled myself together. I had more questions to ask; I might as well keep going now that I’d started.

  “I had found this summer a wonderful supply of raffia in the most beautiful and varied colors,” my grandmother had written. “I made myself a pair of colorful sandals by crocheting tightly the fiber and sewing them together using double layer for the sole and lining the inside with cardboard. These sandals were much admired, light, cool, summery. I was asked if I could do others.”

  With her usual resourcefulness, my grandmother talked the village cobbler into lending her his forms, and she threw herself into shoe production with the same energy she had once spent on patient care and cutting-edge diagnostic techniques.

  I was a one-person factory, at times Armand helping, and though I remember at the height of production working from very early morning to late at night, I could not produce much, as I also took pride to do it well. Those multicolored sandals were really very pretty.

  In the summer of 1942, as “Free” France grew less and less free and my grandmother searched for a way out, everything, even a few strands of raffia, began to look like a lifeline. “I was told that an American Jewish Agency [in Marseille] tried to get out Jews and also supported those stranded.… They could do nothing for me, and they could not give support either anymore.” She couldn’t remember if she’d sent them a sample pair of sandals or simply asked for advice, but someone in Marseille had found a retail outlet for her sandals. For a time, she wrote, “I could have had a real factory with many workers to fill the orders I got subsequently.” But not for long: the raffia ran out, and there was no more to be found anywhere. Since there was, to my knowledge, no organization called the American Jewish Agency operating in Marseille in 1942, I surmised that she had written to the American Relief Center, run by Varian Fry, whose memoirs I was reading at the time.

  “Have you—did you ever hear of Varian Fry?” I asked my grandfather.

  “Of course I have.”

  “Did you ever try to contact his agency?”

  “Why would I do that? It was all hopeless by then.” He pressed his lips shut, as if to crush the memory of those myriad disappointments, and gazed away from my face. “Besides, he helped artists and writers and such. Who was I? Do you know the Yiddish word chutzpah?” Although he meant the word in its traditional sense of shameless effrontery, I privately thought my grandmother had shown it in the American sense of self-confident audacity. I wondered whether they’d argued about her writing that letter, and although loath to mention my grandmother again, I saw no way around it. “My grandmother says that she made raffia sandals and you helped her, that summer, and that she—”

  “She made them?” he interrupted. “We made them.” He sniffed. “She wouldn’t have been able to do it without me. It was hard work. Crocheting the raffia tightly was difficult enough, but she wasn’t strong enough to sew the soles together, once she’d made them. We spent all day together, working on those shoes.”

  All day together. I saw them sitting at that kitchen table, bent over the same task, united. All the things that must have bound them to each other: waiting to hear from the American Relief Center in the hope it had found some way to get them out of France, waiting to hear from the shop in Marseille, waiting to hear from the woman who’d sold them the raffia. And beyond that, all the little ingenuities their everyday life demanded of them—not to mention missing their old life, craving things they could not have—and, threading through it all, fear. They must have loved each other, I thought, even if it was only the causal consequence of eating together, working together, sleeping together. Surviving together. Sourrwviving.

  “Did you …” Did you love her? I wanted to ask. I hesitated; my courage failed. “Did you like it?” I finished, lamely. “That is, I mean, did you find it satisfying, working together? Selling something you had made?”

  He looked thoughtful, almost dreamy. “When I look back …”

  I waited.

  “When I look back, it’s as if … it’s as if I were blowing on leaves. Like a layer of leaves spread out”… he held his palms together, facing up, “and I blow on them”… he blew a puff of air over his hands, “and they lift for just a second”… he made a fluttery, upward motion, “and fall”… he fluttered them down again, “before I can really see what’s under them.”

  Julien had told me to call him if I wanted a ride from the station in Montélimar when I returned from my grandfather’s, and so I conquered my shyness and did. When I stepped out of the train, I saw him waiting for me in his old gray Citroën. He got out of the car as I approached, and we kissed three times, left cheek, right cheek, left cheek, as people do in the Ardèche. He put my bag in the backseat. “How was it?” he asked. “How’s your grandfather?”

  “It’s hard to tell.” I recounted our adventure with the kettle.

  “Have you thought about what you’re going to do when he can’t live on his own anymore?”

  We left Montélimar and drove over the Rhône River. “I have thought about it. And I don’t know. He has no plans, and he doesn’t seem to believe it’s ever going to happen. And it’s not like I can force him to move.”

  “What about your mom and your uncle?”

  “They’re so far away … what can they do? At least I can keep an eye on him.”

  “But then who keeps an eye on you?”

  I shrugged. I had felt excited, excited in a purely youthful, nongrandparent-obsessed way, upon seeing Julien. His questions made my heart swerve back to all my worries, and I felt a bit like crying, which in turn made me feel embarrassed. It felt strange, talking to someone who seemed to tap into my feelings so directly.

  “You and your questions.” I mustered a smile. “I don’t have any answers today. Tell me what’s happening with you.”

  “Same old, same old,” he said. “It was a pretty good week. Minus is getting big. Minette is going to reject her soon. I need to find her a home.” Minus was the kitten of Julien’s cat, Minette.

  “I’d like a kitten.”

  “You live too close.” He looked at me out of the corner of his eyes and grinned.

  “Why is that a problem?”

  “The kitten will find its way back to my house, and you’ll follow it, and my house will be even more crowded than before. You’ve seen my place. It’s small enough as it is.”

  “Minus would stay with me,” I insisted. “I’d take good care of her. I’d shower her with affection.”

  He laughed. “Seriously, I can’t give you a kitten. What would you do with it when you go back to America?”

  “Maybe I don’t want to go back to America,” I countered. “Maybe I’d rather have a kitten.”

  “Oh, really?”

  “Who knows? I like it here.”

  “Well, if I give you a kitten, does that mean you’ll stay?”

  I smiled and shrugged. “We’ll see.”

  Julien dropped me off in La Roche. “There’s a little music festival this weekend. You should come. Maybe I’ll see you there?”

  When Saturday night arrived, I made myself go. I stayed out late, listening to music and chatting with people. I was pleased to discover how many familiar faces there now were in Alba. Toward the end of the evening, I ran into Julien, and he invited me back to his house for coffee. It was two o’clock in the morning, and neither of us is the kind of person who drinks coffee at two o’clock in the morning, but we’re both people who like to do what we say,
so we sat at Julien’s table and drank our coffee, talking about this and that, Minus the kitten playing at our feet. When we had finished, there was a shy silence. “I should be going home,” I said, getting up. Julien rose, too, and walked me out onto his terrace, which was overgrown with honeysuckle. The stars were out. The air smelled sweet. It was chilly, and Julien wrapped his sweatshirt around my shoulders. He kissed me on the forehead. “Je vais m’occuper de toi,” he promised. “I’m going to look out for you.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  THE NEXT DAY, A SUNDAY, I WALKED UP THE HILL to Alba to buy groceries for the week, my new market basket swinging on my arm. The first person I ran into was the innkeepers’ daughter, who winked and said, “Julien, huh?” I blushed and smiled, and she laughed. “Good for you. He’s a good guy.” And that was how I learned there are no secrets in a village the size of Alba.

  This realization made me think differently about my grandparents’ time in Caudiès and St. Paul. I had always used the words hiding out to describe their time in the Pyrenees, had always, in my childhood nightmares, searched for a place to hide. But now it occurred to me how extremely visible and exposed they—and particularly my grandmother, with her cures for the sick and her unsolicited advice—had been. Now I understood: my grandparents had not survived because they were hidden. They had survived—miraculously—because they were known.

  In St. Paul de Fenouillet … I knew the doctor and had made friends with some of the upper-crust citizens. One of them—an elderly lady living in a substantial house on a square surrounded by the important shops; i.e., the center and not too far from the side street where we lived—held sort of a “salon” in her very large front room.… Whoever came for anything to the center [of town] stopped by and in to dispense news, comments, sit down, had a drink, tea or else. I was there almost daily and apparently popular—I believe … her name was a typical one for the region, “Peyralade.” She was important, respected, valuable for advice and help.… It was she who ordered a pair of wool gloves for the gendarme, gave me the wool, afterward said they fitted and were appreciated. When Erna and her roommate at four a.m. were woken up and me to interpret, one new gendarme (apparently) asked about me. I froze, when the other gendarme—I thought later had the gloves I knitted—turned to the questioner and asked: “Is she on the list?” whereupon I was asked my name, not being on the list he was told that they had yet to get elsewhere, and they left with Tante Erna and her roommate.