In those three months, I needed to find a job in France that provided me with a visa—either that or prove to the French that I already was a citizen. By all rights, I should have been one: both my grandparents and my mother had held French passports for significant portions of their lives. I set about assembling the papers to prove it.
Since searching for work abroad and negotiating with French bureaucrats does not keep a girl in fans and feathers, I found a job reading fortunes at a local New Age bookstore—which made my grandmother crow when I called to tell her I was making use of my fallback skill: “See, I told you it would come in handy!” When it wasn’t my shift to read cards, I stocked the store, helped customers, wrestled with the intricacies of shelving New Age books—with channeled materials, do you alphabetize by the name of the channeler or the name of the spirit being channeled?—and considered such thorny questions as whether the store needed a special permit to carry ritual daggers for pagan ceremonies and which stones worked best in pendulums. Then I’d drive home to my papers and notes with Utah Phillips and Ani DiFranco on my car stereo: “No matter how New Age you get, old age gonna kick your ass.”
I arrived overprepared and half an hour early for my visa appointment at the French consulate, armed with a giant stack of birth certificates, death certificates, marriage and divorce certificates, naturalization papers, and more. I included pictures of the house in La Roche and writing samples from my book. My parents temporarily transferred money into my bank account to make it look like I was independently wealthy or at least had enough to live on for a year. I brought proof of insurance, proof of robust physical and mental health, and a letter from Julien stating that he would house and support me, all in triplicate.
The man at the consulate tossed everything aside but the letter from Julien. He held it out to me as if he were presenting evidence to a guilty party. “If you’re going to live together, why don’t you just get married?”
“Well … um …,” I stammered, “I mean, we’ve only—”
He cut me off. “You’re already living together.”
I nodded.
He gave me an accusing glare, and an image of the Monty Python sketch about the Spanish Inquisition popped into my head.
“Yes,” I suppressed a smile, “but we’ve only been together six months.”
“What do I care?” he said crossly, indicating my file. “This is just an inconvenience to everyone.”
“But I don’t want to get married.”
He looked me in the eye. “You are already living together,” he repeated, enunciating like a cop talking to an unruly drunk.
I pulled myself up in my seat, the Spanish Inquisition forgotten. “Sir, you’re not advocating I marry for papers, are you? Isn’t that illegal?”
“YOU. ARE. ALREADY. LIVING. TOGETHER. It’s up to you. I’m just saying, if you get married, you can go back now. Otherwise you may be stuck here indefinitely.”
“But maybe we don’t want to get married!”
“Then why are you living together?”
“But I fulfill all the requirements,” I argued. “I have all my papers in order.”
“That remains to be seen. There’s no guarantee you’ll be granted a visa.” He stood up, impassive now. “We’ll contact you in six weeks or so.”
“What about going back?”
He shrugged. “You can always go back on a six-month tourist visa next year.”
“But I need a job. I need a real visa.”
“That’s not my problem.”
I stormed out of the consulate in tears, convinced I would be stuck in America forever. On reflection, I see that I was what the French would call allumée—inspired and blinded and a little bit crazy from a light that colored everything I saw. Luckily, Julien was home when I called, sobbing, from the parking lot.
“Sweetheart, pull yourself together,” he consoled me. “This is not 1942. You’re fine. We’ll see each other again.”
I could not help noticing the great difference in our reactions, and it occurred to me it might be worthwhile to make an effort not to live in the strange looking glass of memory. On the drive back from Atlanta, I tried to estimate how much of my life I’d spent, as Julien put it, thinking it was 1942, waking up bathed in the terror of my nightmares or clenched with panic, keeping my shoes by the door, comparing every moment I could to an analogous instance in my grandparents’ lives, as if by tracing my experiences over their own, I could make up for something that had been lost. I stopped for a coffee and drank it outside, seated on my car hood and looking around at the winter landscape. I pulled out the big refugee file, which I’d brought with me in the vain hope that I could guilt-trip the French consulate into giving me a visa, and flipped it open to one of the many pages I’d marked, a sheet of finicky administrative questions my grandfather had answered in handwriting I recognized as if it had been scrawled yesterday.
What is your native language? French (or Yiddish?)
Beyond the profession for which you were trained, what type of work could you learn the most easily? Multiple skills: translator, teacher, accountant, laborer, interpreter, assistant land surveyor, proofreader, etc., etc.
Why did you leave your country of origin and why are you unable to return to it? Because I am a Jew and I risk deportation.
Of course I realized it wasn’t 1942. Any self-respecting historian knows—intellectually, at least—to beware the all-too-human tendency to identify with her subjects. At the same time, although my encounter at the consulate could not actually teach me what my grandparents had felt as they filled out forms for hostile bureaucracies, it did make me think about being placed at the mercy of stacks of paper and bored civil servants, struggling against the hard, blind edges of the law. Even if my anger was a privilege of my station and my grandparents had not reacted similarly, the comparison pushed me to think about reduction, about what it was like to be pared down to a series of answers on a piece of paper. My grandparents had been categorized so many times, as Jews, as immigrants, as survivors. I thought of Anne, the daughter of friends of my grandmother, and her crusade to record and preserve survivors’ memories of the time before the war, before that generation had been reduced to remembering the Shoah for the benefit of history. I shuddered, thinking of the endless punishment it must be to live with both the personal and the cultural aftereffects of a trauma: while other people their age had been granted a quiet lifetime of ordinary memories that would evaporate peacefully into the hereafter when they expired, my grandparents were hounded not only by the memory of what they’d lived through in the war, not only by the loss of all that had been destroyed in those six years, but also by the exhausting injunction, “never forget.”
I got back into the car. Now I am certain that the poetry of my grandparents’ silence and the hidden time bomb of the house in La Roche were both the lure with which they drew me in to remember and record their stories and their last-ditch attempt to blast themselves out of that series of reductions. But back then I was too busy trying to see my way to the center of their story to notice what it might look like in its broader arc.
As I drove, I tried again to picture Anna and Armand during their last night together, in Erna’s cousin’s apartment. I strained to listen: Were they whispering plans to each other? I squinted my eyes against the highway to see if I couldn’t conjure up two young, tired bodies, thin and trembling with emotion, unable to fathom all they’d just survived. I wanted them to hold hands. I wanted Armand to get up, rummage through a bag, and then slip that silver dish with AUBETTE printed in the bottom to Anna, as a sign, a coded promise.
But perhaps the little silver dish meant something else entirely. Perhaps it was a memento, a brave acknowledgment that they were not right for each other and should part ways. And of course, given my grandfather’s penchant for cutting people off to avoid the complications of saying goodbye, maybe they weren’t even speaking when they left each other, and the AUBETTE dish lay forgotten at the bott
om of a bag.
The next day I went back to my job at the New Age bookstore, telling total strangers what to expect from their lives and shelving books on delving into past incarnations—the irony of which was entirely lost on me at the time.
Soon afterward I drove to New York to pick up my grandmother and bring her down to her house in Asheville, which she visited more rarely now that she didn’t fly.
From Pearl River to the northern tip of Virginia, I looked for a way to raise the questions I wanted to ask. At lunch I watched her comment on American consumerism and Bush’s imperialism to the couple in line ahead of us at the Cracker Barrel. She was having so much fun I didn’t want to interrupt. Once seated, we ate our cornbread and gossiped about the customers at the other tables. I listened while she explained how she’d toilet-trained all the babies over six months old in her refugee camps so they could save the few precious diapers they had for the infants. Let it go, I thought. She should remember what she feels like remembering. That’s enough. But not for nothing did Grandma have a reputation for witchiness. As soon as we got back into the car, she asked about my book.
“I’m writing a story, but is it even your story? I don’t know. I’ve learned so many disconnected things about you—it’s hard to put them into a narrative.”
“What are you talking about? You have all my papers. Like I always say, when I’m gone, you can just publish them and be very rich, like the others.”
“They would need some editing,” I said lightly, thinking of the jumble of writing she’d sent me and the hours I’d spent figuring out what exactly had happened when.
“Sure, sure.” Her voice wasn’t exactly wistful, and it wasn’t exactly bitter. It must be very strange indeed, I thought, to see others rising to fame and supposed fortune just because they had managed to recount their memories in a cogent way. Bearing witness must be the worst kind of celebrity there is. Grandma, of course, had no time to waste on such thoughts. “Don’t you talk to your grandfather?” she pursued.
“Well, yes, but you never have the same stories.”
“Like what? What did he tell you?”
I tried to think of all the questions on my list. “Well, for example, do you remember losing your watch when you were picking grapes in the Pyrenees?”
“What?”
I repeated the story my grandfather had told me once, of a day in September when the sun had started to slant and the foreman had called them in from the vineyard where he and Anna were harvesting grapes. One by one the pickers came to the ends of their rows and returned to the truck, pitched their grapes in gently, and stood waiting for the daily liter of wine that came with their pay. They talked tiredly to each other, compared rows picked, sore shoulders, suntans. Suddenly, Anna looked at Armand in dismay. “My watch,” she exclaimed.
“What’s wrong?”
“My watch. My watch is gone. The watch my father gave me.” The watch had been a graduation gift from Josef to Anna on the day she graduated from gymnasium. (He hadn’t come to the ceremony, and she believed he had forgotten all about her; it turned out he had been held up helping someone in need. He told her that the watch should remind her that she was always on his mind, but that she in turn should remember others who were less fortunate than she.)
The pickers stood there silently. This wasn’t a time to be losing things. “Where did you lose it?” one of them asked.
What a stupid question, Armand thought. If she knew, it wouldn’t be lost.
Anna didn’t seem to notice. “I don’t know, I had it on this morning. I had it on at the break, too, because I looked at it when it was time to go back.”
Another picker said, “Good luck finding it. How much ground did you cover today?”
Anna shook her head. A tear escaped from the corner of her eye. Another tear escaped. She kept shaking her head. Another. She bit her lip. They kept coming, tears and tears blurring the endless identical rows of vines. She couldn’t stop. Armand had hardly ever seen her cry.
“I’ll find it.” He touched her arm. “You’ll see.” He set off along one of the rows, looking down at the pale earth, the dust and rocks and the gray trunks of the vines. He stopped. He pressed his hands to his temples. He pictured the rows they’d walked slowly all day, his entire body tense with the effort of visualizing their path. He had to find it. He began to move, his eyes narrowed, fixed on the ground at the gnarled feet of the grapevines. The cicadas’ creaky roaring seemed to shut him into his looking. At first he chose his rows randomly, then with more and more purpose. Within a few minutes, he saw the watch glinting on the ground. He stooped to pick it up and felt a lightness wash over him, a sense of freedom like the first time he had seen the sea. He was so happy. He stood, squared his shoulders, and walked back to Anna, who was still standing, small and bleak-faced, by the truck. “Here.” He extended it shyly. “I found it.” Anna reached her hand forward, and he took her left wrist and fixed the watch back onto it.
In my imagination, Anna would have stepped forward, and they would have embraced, she with her head buried in his shoulder, their feet planted on the ground, with the smell of the dry wind about them and the comfort of arms clasped, long familiarity, blind love. But I didn’t say that part to my grandmother.
As I talked, I waited for Grandma to jump in and correct me, or at least to cut me off and change the subject. But she said nothing.
I waited. The car was silent, so silent that for a moment I wondered if she had stopped listening and fallen asleep.
“He told you that?” she asked finally.
“Yes, he did.”
I took my eyes off the road and stole a glance at her. Sure enough, I saw the sad, surprised expression that settled over her face whenever we spoke about my grandfather. “I can’t remember that at all.”
“Really?”
“Not at all, no.”
Silence filled the car again. My mind raced, thinking of what and how I could ask about their separation after crossing the Swiss border, their subsequent marriage.
“It’s a romantic story,” I ventured. “It seems surprising when you know what happened later—”
Now Grandma did cut me off. “Romantic?”
“Sure—you lose your watch, you’re brokenhearted, he finds it for you against all odds. By sheer force of will. Out of love for you.”
“Ach … no …” She trailed off and sighed. “He never really loved me.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Well, you know that saying.”
“The saying?”
“The opposite of love is not hate—”
“Oh, right.” It was my turn to interrupt. I finished the sentence for her. “The opposite of love is indifference.” Grandma liked that one. She said it to me often.
“Right. Exactly.” Grandma went on. “The opposite of love is not hate. It’s indifference.”
“So? What does that mean?”
“So, I’m indifferent. Once I loved him, now not.” She held up her hands, weighing the two ends of the story in her palms; they balanced out. “But he hates me. He hates me.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. It was true, of course, and it had done a great deal to ruin my family’s mental health, but it still seemed too awful and mean to acknowledge it baldly.
But Grandma wasn’t waiting for me to say anything. “It’s logic, simple logic. You can only conclude he never loved me.”
“No, Grandma!” I exclaimed. “That’s a fallacy. If the opposite of A is B, that doesn’t say anything about C.”
“You sound like your mother teaching one of her classes. Talk sense.”
“I mean, logically, you can’t conclude he didn’t love you.”
“Why not?”
“Well, if we take what you said about the opposite of love, then if he hates you, the only thing you can actually conclude by logic is that he doesn’t feel the opposite of love for you. I mean, I’m not exactly sure if this fits into a logical formula—”
“So?” Grandma cut me off.
“Look, I’m saying the fact that he hates you now doesn’t mean he never loved you. It means that he never felt the opposite of love for you. Maybe it means he never actually stopped loving you.”
“You think so?”
“I do.” I’d said it to comfort her, but as I reasoned it out, I realized it must be true.
“Hmph,” was Grandma’s dubious response. She turned away from me to look out the window at the mountains. Then she turned back. “Well, it’s good you’re there to take care of him. Don’t talk to me. I’m going to sleep.”
My grandmother and I didn’t speak about my grandfather again during the rest of her visit to Asheville. “You can put them in a letter,” she said, when I tried to ask her questions. “I can’t—it makes me too tired. To think I used to believe being blind was worse than being deaf,” she added, the closest she ever got to complaining about herself. Between my shifts at the New Age bookstore, we sat in her living room, with the flowered, fringed tablecloth and the Russian flag in the hand-thrown vase, and played Rummikub, which she called “The Game,” since it was the only one she knew, other than solitaire. I’d play as slowly as I could, as if to stall time by doing so. “Don’t do me any favors,” she’d remonstrate whenever she saw I might be letting her win. So I’d pull myself together and beat her every time, contesting, for old time’s sake, all the rules and exceptions she’d woven into her game. “Got time for another?” she’d ask at the end of each round, sweeping the Rummikub tiles into the plastic ice cream tub she kept them in. And I’d shake my head in admiration at the zest and adventure my grandmother managed to inject into everything, even a game she’d played a million times, and we’d play again.
One time she told my fortune, and one time I told hers. I don’t remember what we said to each other, except that we agreed on one thing: people get their fortunes told for one reason only—they want you to tell them that everything will be all right.
A Fifty-Year Silence: Love, War, and a Ruined House in France Page 18