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

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by Miranda Richmond Mouillot


  “You can come home,” my mother offered, when I relayed the details of this life to her over the phone. “Maybe you should come home.”

  But I didn’t. I wanted to prove to myself that I could tough it out. My grandmother kept writing me encouraging letters about how much I was learning, how much character I was forging, and I didn’t want to disappoint her, either. But more than that, I felt that I was not finished, that there was something else for me to discover, though I didn’t know quite what.

  And if President Chirac hadn’t dissolved the National Assembly that spring, perhaps I never would have found out.

  One week in May 1997, my grandfather phoned the boardinghouse to say I should not come to his apartment that Friday night, that instead he would pick me up at seven a.m. sharp that Sunday, because he had to go vote in the early legislative elections. He didn’t explain further but promised to take me out for a celebratory dinner if the Left won a majority.

  On the appointed day, I waited in the vestibule of the boardinghouse until his car rolled up the Chemin de Verey, turned around, and parked outside the gate. He disliked my housemistress intensely and refused to park on school property in case he ran into her. I got into the car, and we drove south in silence, over little highways that wiggled precariously through the mountains, on main streets through half-abandoned villages, on back roads past quiet factories with dark eyes shattered into their windowpanes, past geraniums and lace curtains and dingy cafés. My grandfather pointed out monuments to the Resistance along the way, sad gray stones tucked up onto the banks of the road, where bands of men had been denounced, discovered, shot down. Entire villages, he told me, had been massacred because they wouldn’t surrender their resistance fighters. Women and children had been burned alive because they would not speak. As I listened, I thought of all the times my grandmother complained to me that Americans had no sense of history. Now I understood that she meant Americans had no sense of her history, of our history. Here the past was everywhere, an entire continent sown with memories. For the first time, I wondered if she had sent me back so I could learn what it was like to live in that punishing landscape. I cracked open the window a tiny bit; I felt suffocated. The wind pierced the silence inside the car, whose pneumatic suspension system I imagined pumping more air into itself to hold the weight of those stories. I wondered what life would be like without that load to carry.

  Then my grandfather rolled his window down, too, and we left the back roads for the highway. For ten minutes we went delightfully fast, and suddenly everything felt lighter again. Without slowing down until he was well into the curve and pulling up hard against the tollbooth, my grandfather exited the highway, and there we were in the suddenly hotter, yellower, greener South of France.

  Over the centuries many people have written about this warm and wonderful region, the dark trees on the pebbly hillsides, the sassy tango of pink flowers peeping out from behind the oleander’s bottle-green fingers, the villages made of stones the color of honey. At fifteen, however, I had not read a single one of these accounts and was unprepared for all that beauty.

  Even as we crossed the river and sped through the gray town of Le Teil, which looked as if it had seen better days, I was intoxicated. The road began to snake up the side of a mountain, which dropped away to reveal precariously perched farms and garden beds, and clotheslines dangling pants and bedsheets at unexpected angles into the ravine below. Up and up, around a big bend, past stone farmhouses, an abandoned filling station, an elderly mammoth hulk of a factory, an abandoned train station, an abandoned hotel, and then grapevines, stripes and stripes of them, marching away toward the hillsides. Ahead of us and to the left, beyond the vineyards, I saw a castle, of the fairy-tale kind, with one half of its quatrefoil shape fallen to ruin. That was Alba, though I didn’t know it yet.

  Aerial view of Alba with the mairie (town hall) in the foreground and the castle in the background, circa 1960.

  We turned left with the regiments of vines, which seemed to march beside us along a flat stretch of road, and then I really saw the village, draped over its little hill like a somnolent moth with drowsy terra-cotta wings speckled in mushroom gray, crowned by that mournful, fanciful castle.

  We arrived just after noon on a wide main street, parked beneath the plane trees, and emerged into the heat of the May afternoon. “Stay here,” my grandfather instructed, and went inside the town hall to vote.

  I sat in the car with the door open, my legs sticking out the side, and watched the town. Sometimes, even now, when I walk through Alba, I try to reason out just what it was that made me fall in love with the place. It was not the first intact medieval village I had ever seen, nor even the most beautiful. The stones in its walls were dark and ungainly, shaped by time and the river and placed every which way. The little church was austere and uninteresting. The buildings had little to nothing in the way of embellishment. No particular effort had been made to charm the outside world: no window boxes, no awnings, no brightly colored shutters. There were no endearing establishments selling snacks or souvenirs, just the necessities: pharmacy, grocery, tobacconist, bakery, bar. Alba’s attraction seemed deeply private, homey and homemade, beautiful for itself, not for passersby.

  I want this place to be my home. It was an odd, disorienting thought to have, but I could not make it go away.

  When he returned, we drove a short way down a hill, past mulberry and fig trees, and turned into the gravel parking lot of a tiny hamlet. We left the car and walked under a low archway, onto a medieval street cool as a pool and cellar-dim. Everything was built from anthracite-colored stone, the street itself and the houses that crouched along it. Across from where I stood, a cherry tree perched on a rock wall had dropped its dark red fruit in a gooey, shadowy circle. The air smelled of old dust and dry grass.

  The house in La Roche (on the right), circa 1960.

  “Look up,” Grandpa said.

  I obeyed and saw an enormous rock, a prehistoric creature, tufted with clumps of grass and crowned with a sort of stone fortification. Here and there a tree or a bush slanted off it in an unruly tangle. “That’s La Roche,” he told me. “There used to be a castle at the top.”

  To our left, the street dropped down in wide steps toward an arched portal in a fortified stone wall. We descended the steps and stopped in front of a recessed door, made of wood that had weathered to nearly the same gray as the stones. The lock creaked, and the door groaned open across an uneven floor. A chilly hush emerged from a whitewashed hall. We stepped inside. Gray light, slow as an old man, filtered through a dirty transom. “Wait here.” Grandpa took a key from a hook and disappeared. In a moment, a light appeared. We stepped forward into a room furry with dust.

  The furniture, arranged around a gigantic hearth with a stone mantel, slept under sheets of cobwebs like a royal retinue under a spell: to the left, a table and a motley assortment of chairs; to the right, a bed with metal curlicues at its head and foot, a green basket chair, and a rustic stool. The mantel was crowned with an odd assortment of objects: a coffee grinder, a hurricane lamp in pale green glass, and a sailing ship made from some sticks and a Pelforth beer carton. I looked through the dirty windowpanes of the door on the opposite side of the room and saw a terrace covered in weeds, bordered by a stone wall. Beyond it, a path led from the hamlet toward a small river a few yards away. A cloud blew over the sun as I stood, transfixed, watching the wind brush over the earth and grass. That was when the bomb my grandmother had hidden so many years ago went off. My ears buzzed. I felt butterflies in my stomach. It echoed through the rational part of my brain, blinding me to the fact that the house was primitive, dusty, and cold inside, and flashing an alternate image of the place in my mind’s eye: fixed up and cozy, with me shelling peas on the terrace. I want to live here, I thought. I must live here.

  I heard my grandfather calling and followed his voice to the hallway, where he was dragging open another door into a huge space. “The magnaneraie,” he said. “This
is where they raised silkworms.” He pointed out a rudimentary stone niche he said had once been used to build fires to keep the silkworms warm. The room was wide and lofty, with ceilings two stories high and windows overgrown with vines. A petrol stove enameled in two shades of brown hunched in one corner. There was a large lumpy bed beside it; at the other end of the room were two twin beds and a round table with heavily carved legs. A wooden structure, like a loft but with no floorboards, overhung the lumpy bed and the stove, and a narrow walkway ran along the inner wall of the room, connecting the loft to two doors on the upper floor. The only way up was a crude ladder handmade from splintery scraps of wood. Grandpa gestured to it. “Climb up.”

  I acquiesced. Not daring to forsake the relative safety of the ladder for the rickety walkway, I leaned far enough to one side to catch a glimpse of a room with a dirt floor and a sloping wooden ceiling. Through the door of the room, I could see a Turkish toilet squatting crookedly below a length of green hose attached to a faucet.

  “You see?” he called up to me. “This house has all the modern amenities. I even put in a second toilet just in case the first one was ever occupied and someone had an urgent need.”

  “How practical.” I tried to imagine a need so urgent I’d use the Turkish toilet. The scenarios were all unpleasant, so I climbed back down without anything else to say.

  Grandpa had already left the room. When I found him, he was back in the entryway, unlocking another door, located to the right of the front door. He yanked it open, and I winced as the wood groaned across the concrete floor. We crossed into a structure that seemed wholly separate from the part of the house we’d just explored. “The tower.” He gestured up to the high ceiling. To our left, a poured concrete structure that resembled a bunker took up half the tower’s floor space; the remaining space in front of us and to the right was a dusty, cobwebby mess. “This is the wine cellar.” Grandpa indicated the bunker, whose walls were more than a meter thick. Inside, a bare bulb shone on empty wine racks and a few elderly-looking bottles. “There used to be wine here, but it was all stolen.”

  “By whom?”

  “By people here. The neighbors are thieves.”

  I was eager to leave the wine cellar, which looked a little Bluebeard-ish, so I backed out into the light. Grandpa locked the door behind us.

  He pointed up to a small opening in the wall, with what looked like a miniature window seat set into it. “Do you see that?”

  I nodded.

  “Once, long ago, a lady sat there with her handwork, watching for her knight to come home from the Crusades.”

  “Really?” I had never heard my grandfather voice a flight of fancy before, and this only added to my love for the place.

  He pointed again. “You see that little ledge? That’s where she would set her sewing so she’d have enough light.” This imaginary woman would have had to be elf-size to fit in the niche, but my grandfather’s authority was absolute and the idea was delightful, so I forbore to comment.

  We looked, and then suddenly that was enough. Grandpa sent me back out to the entryway while he went to turn off the electricity. I stood in the doorway and gazed up and down the stone street, the vines making green curtains over the power lines, the young trees growing out of abandoned stone walls, the gray-green and yellow lichen and the tiny succulents creeping over everything. It was warmly, thickly silent.

  Through my daze, I tried to understand the strange spell that had enveloped me. The house had a thereness: people had come and gone from its rooms, but the house itself had not moved or changed. It had a presence so palpable, I felt I could grip it with my hands. Its walls felt safe, cool, and beautiful, as if no memory or sad event could ever perturb them. In my mind’s eye, living there would be like diving into a still, subterranean universe immune to the changeful, hot, dry, catastrophic world above. I imagined its stones were a plain, strong exoskeleton into which I could fold my soft and confusing existence.

  I was startled by the sound of my grandfather’s voice. Reluctantly, I stepped outside; he moved forward and turned the key twice in the lock; and we left.

  “What do you think of it, my dear?”

  “It’s lovely.” I searched for adequate words and failed to find them. I didn’t dare say that walking into the house made me feel like I was coming home. “It’s the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen,” I told him instead.

  “It might have been lovely,” he conceded. “I’ll tell you about it someday. Come along now.”

  I left Geneva just a month later. I was so happy the year was ending, I didn’t realize until the day I departed that I, in all my isolation, had constituted nearly the whole of my grandfather’s society. My grandfather hated separations and usually picked a fight the day someone left to distract himself from the pain of parting. There was none of that this time. “Il y aura un vide,” he said as we got ready to go to the airport. There will be an emptiness. He embraced me, then pulled back and touched my cheek. He had tears in his eyes. I imagined his deep green carpets with no more scuffs, his polished wooden bowls with no more fruit in them. The breadth of his solitude frightened me. As my plane took off, I wondered, Had my grandmother known it would be like this? Was the loneliness that replaced me when I left a form of revenge? Was I sent to teach him a lesson, to show him all it is to love?

  CHAPTER FIVE

  WHEN I CAME HOME FROM GENEVA, AT FIFTEEN and a half years old, I was eager to set aside the rigidity and lonesomeness that had defined my life there and have a real go at being a teenager, that useless and wasteful American contrivance my grandmother so deplored. I relegated the house in Alba and my grandparents’ mysteries to the back of my mind, bought a fake fur coat and purple high heels, and dyed my hair blue. I learned to drive and pasted bumper stickers all over my ’86 Toyota Cressida. I made new friends, drank coffee downtown, and skinny-dipped in the Warren Wilson pond; I dated boys, stayed up late reading aloud bad poetry, and tasted my first White Russian.

  But the past is not so easily set aside. I began to suffer from panic attacks and depression. I’d be sashaying along just fine in those purple high heels when, with no warning, sinewy fingers of sadness would reach up from some old, dark part of my consciousness and clamp down on me with strangling force. Once the invisible hair trigger for those panic attacks was tripped, I’d hurtle at warp speed through a cosmos of despair; I tapped into the grief aorta of the entire world. I’d come to and find myself slumped in the bathtub, or covered in scratches, or driving on the wrong side of the road.

  No one in my family thought to connect these incidents to our family history, not immediately at least. “Hot shower,” my grandmother advised when I came to her hoping she’d prescribe an antidote to my misery. “When my patients seized up like that, I always put them under hot water. Very hot. Relaxes the muscles. And then go to bed.”

  Then one of my friends started working for a man who claimed to be a psychic and a medical intuitive. He spent an evening showing off his skills on me to a group of friends. I don’t remember exactly what happened, except that the room went dark and I spiraled down into my pit of desolation. “Your past is calling you,” he announced when I recovered, as if we were both connected to some sidereal switchboard. “Did you have a tragedy in your family? Something to do with the Holocaust, I’d bet.” He looked smug and unremorseful about the terror he’d just caused me. “Check into that.”

  “This will all come down to you,” my father said to me, when I visited him in Knoxville and brought up my panic attacks and my encounter with the psychic, just as he had when I was younger and woke up from those nightmares or voiced one of my odd fears. “Each of us has our own ways of connecting with the world of the dead. You’re the only grandchild. You’re the one who’s going to have to carry it.” I wondered how a locum tenens pathologist who subscribed to the Skeptical Inquirer could make such pat statements about the world of the dead. And I wondered how I could possibly carry a thing whose outlines I couldn’t even se
e.

  On May 23, 1998, two years almost to the day after my grandfather first showed me the house, the phone rang. We were celebrating my stepfather’s birthday with a Sunday brunch on the back porch, eating sticky buns from the farmer’s market and watching the carpenter bees chew holes in the rafters.

  My mother, as she told me later, was surprised and a little nervous to hear her father’s voice when she answered the phone, in the way we were always surprised and a little nervous when he called. She wondered whether he might be calling for my stepfather’s birthday but dismissed that as unlikely, and when she heard the casual tone he reserved for discussing potentially controversial things, she braced herself. He opened with a few niceties, then cut to the chase. “You may recall I have a house in the South of France?”

  My mother did her best to sound extra polite and extremely neutral as she searched her memory for a house. “Only vaguely.” She thought she recalled a conversation from a visit with him in 1979.

  I doubt Grandpa cared one way or the other, but he paused in acknowledgment of her response. “Well, I no longer go there myself—it needs too much work—but I often lend it to people of modest means who could not otherwise afford a vacation.”

 

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