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

by Miranda Richmond Mouillot

  “I’m going with you,” she repeated. “And then we’ll take the bus to Alba and present ourselves at the mairie.”

  “What do they care about us at the mairie?”

  “You never know. You should always talk to people. Make yourself known.”

  I gave up on arguing with her. As we walked out of the hotel room, she snapped at me, “Where’s your passport?”

  “In my suitcase.”

  “Don’t you ever leave the room without your passport.” Sensing it was best not to protest, I retrieved the passport and put it in my purse.

  “What will you do if your purse gets stolen?” she quizzed.

  I slipped it into my bra and was about to lock the room, when she snapped at me again. “Hide the bags,” she commanded.

  “What?”

  “Hide the bags.”

  “Hide the bags? Hide them where?”

  “Put them in the closet.” I obeyed. “Cover them with those blankets.”

  “Grandma, why—”

  She cut me off. “They look through the bags when you’re not in the room.”

  “Who looks through the bags?” I asked her, but she was already out the door.

  Once I had shut the door and locked it, she hissed, “Hide the keys.”

  When I failed to satisfy her by putting them in my pocket, I stuffed them into my bra next to the passport.

  “It’s a good thing I’m wearing a loose blouse,” I quipped.

  She gave me a pained look, and I thought of what she’d said at the train station yesterday and of her face as she looked at the countryside around her. “You haven’t been back here since 1948?”

  She nodded. Arriving in Montélimar had clearly unleashed a flood of emotions, the shock of which was just as great as the one to her wrist when she fell at the airport. I wondered what exactly it was that she was remembering.

  On the third day of our trip to France, Grandma and I had regained confidence in her resilience and mastery of any and all things, and I made an appointment with a notaire, Marie Frizet, who had told us she could help us find records and figure out my grandmother’s legal questions. She had a soft brown bob that framed pink cheeks, quick, sympathetic eyes, and a ready smile I suspected hid a robust sense of humor.

  “I will tell the story,” Grandma announced, after Maître Frizet had shown us into her office and we had all sat down. She pointed at me. “You take notes.”

  I pulled out a pad of paper, and Grandma began. “When I left my ex-husband, he took the children’s passports—he wanted to intimidate me, in case I changed my mind.” She paused. “And I guess he was right, because I did change the tickets … but I couldn’t go back.”

  Maître Frizet looked nonplussed. “Back where? What tickets?”

  “Grandma,” I said softly, “you’re not making any sense. She doesn’t even know why we’re here.” Raising my voice and turning to the notaire, I added, “We’re here about a house. My grandparents bought a house together in 1948, in Alba-la-Romaine.”

  Maître Frizet made a note.

  I was about to go on, but my grandmother interrupted me. “I know what I’m talking about.” She plunged ahead with her story. “Now, I understand he was angry, but it wasn’t fair of him to take it out on the children. He wouldn’t send the child support, he said he forgot, or he said he was only sending half because everything cost so little in Israel, or saying he would only support one of them or the other. I had very little money. Nobody had any money back then. So if you think about it, he owes me quite a lot of money. Can you imagine, from Israel I had to sail all the way to Nice, take a train to Geneva, so I could go to the UN family office and beg them to make him pay—because I knew they paid him a dependents’ allowance, it was called, I think. I put them through college, graduate school, I sent my son to boarding school, all by myself. He didn’t help with any of it.”

  Maître Frizet had given up on taking notes early in Grandma’s speech. Now she glanced down at her notebook as if she regretted her decision. “So you are owed money by your ex-husband.”

  “No, no—” I interrupted. “They bought the house right before they moved to America. And they divorced a few years later. Well, twenty years later. The house wasn’t mentioned in the divorce settlement. Now he wants to sell it, but he can’t.”

  Maître Frizet looked skeptical. “Back then everything went to the husband. Unless the wife’s name was the only one on the deed. Do you have the deed?”

  I shook my head. “He won’t send it to her. But his notaire says he can’t sell without her power of attorney.”

  “Well, her name must be the only one on the deed, then. Was it a French divorce or an American divorce?”

  My grandmother shook her head. “I think he was seeing another woman. A sculptress, or something. He was really very nasty to me those last few years. The fights … terrible. And then he claimed it was my fault, because I left. I walked out one day when he was at work because I really didn’t want any fuss, and I took the children. And the typewriter. He had another one, in his office.”

  I interrupted. “No one seems to remember whether it was French or American.”

  “Well,” Maître Frizet reasoned, “by French law, if there’s no prenuptial agreement, everything is automatically divided evenly in the case of a divorce. So I think that really, especially if it wasn’t mentioned in the divorce, you own half of the property.”

  My grandmother had already been told this by several other lawyers. She nodded emphatically. “And he’s trying to sell it!”

  “Couldn’t you speak to him about it?”

  Silence. Now it was my grandmother’s turn to look nonplussed.

  “I mean, to explain your side of things—”

  I interrupted again. “They haven’t spoken to each other in about fifty years.”

  Maître Frizet sat back in her chair. “Oh.”

  “He claims that it’s his property because he’s paid taxes on it and repaired it since the beginning,” I explained. “My grandmother only saw it the one time, when she bought it.”

  “He rents it out, I hear,” my grandmother added.

  I could see the notaire writing “rent” on her pad of paper. She stared at it as if it might offer some clarity. “Do you need the money? I could contact his notaire, and we could probably make him give you half of the rent money, and you are certainly entitled to half the money from the sale.” She sounded relieved to have figured out a solution. “In fact, if you sell it, I could arrange for the money to be paid to you monthly, as a pension.”

  Again, my grandmother looked nonplussed.

  “No, no,” I clarified hastily. “My grandmother doesn’t need the money. It’s just that she—” I trailed off. I wasn’t sure what she wanted.

  The conversation limped along for nearly an hour. By the end of it, I had a headache, but my grandmother looked more than satisfied. We shook hands all around. Grandma took Maître Frizet’s card and promised to send her a sheaf of documents. It seemed to have done my grandmother a world of good to tell her story to a neutral party, and I suspected Maître Frizet could see that, since I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what she would actually do with the documents. Back in the taxi, Grandma squeezed my arm triumphantly. “That was very successful.”

  That night we ate dinner in the hotel’s yellow dining room. Grandma seemed jubilant after her visit with the notaire. “You know how to keep from getting drunk?” she asked when the wine arrived.

  I shook my head.

  “At least that’s what my sister—your great-aunt Alma—says: before you drink, you take a tablespoon or so of olive oil, like that.” She raised her injured hand, stiffly, and brought it to her mouth, throwing her head back as if she were drinking a shot of neat whiskey. “You know how she learned that? She used to be a nightclub singer.”

  My eyebrows went up. Grandma nodded, pleased to have surprised me. I knew Alma as a tiny, tough old lady living outside Tel Aviv. It was hard to imag
ine my gin-rummy-playing, ex-elite-athlete (she’d beat national records in Romania and represented her country in the 1932 Maccabiah Games) great-aunt singing in nightclubs.

  “You know my father had the biggest, fanciest restaurant in Czernowitz but no head for business. He had the best chefs, always, and people loved the big, round dining room with the red carpet, gold everywhere. But one year he heard about this new thing, an automat.”

  “An automat?”

  “You know, you put the dishes in one side, they put in a coin and open the door and have a meal, which they had in the big cities in Western Europe. So, what did he do?”

  A rhetorical question.

  “He took all his savings and went to Berlin and bought an automat! The first in the region.”

  “Was it a success?”

  “At first it was a sensation; everyone came to see it. But then there was the depression—big failure. All that money, and no one liked it anymore.”

  “That’s terrible.”

  “Well, if you think about it, when people went out to eat, they wanted a real restaurant, with waiters, and the chefs didn’t like it either! But he always kept the house running the same way, and he paid for everyone’s education. This, because he had the best wine in Romania. He even had a title, he was a purveyor to the Austro-Hungarian emperor. And it was because of this that he saved Alma’s life.”

  “How?”

  “The chief of police was a big drunk—always was. When the Nazis came, they were rounding people up into the trains. They got her.” Grandma took a sip of her wine. “So here she was on a cattle car, in the train station—the train was going to leave. So my father ran to the police chief and collared him. He said, ‘Listen, I’ve been giving you wine since you were this high.’ ” Grandma held her good hand to the height of the table, and I imagined a tiny drunkard. “ ‘Twelve years old! Not even tall enough to see over my counter.’ ”

  She paused.

  “What happened?”

  “Eat your dinner.”

  I picked up my fork but put nothing in my mouth.

  “The police chief says, ‘So what?’ And my father shouts, ‘So? So now the best runner in the history of Romania is on that train, and you are not going to let her be sent away.’ They went down to the train station and went through all the cars and found her and pulled her off the train.”

  “Really?” I glanced around the warm yellow dining room. I felt as if I had been swimming and were coming up for air, as if time were fluid and it could be any year, then or now.

  As if she had read my thoughts, Grandma said, “Back then, the regulars would have had their own napkins that they kept in a cubby near the bar.” She took a bite of food, a sip of wine, and dove again. “The second time the Nazis came, Alma was still at home.”

  “Why didn’t they arrest your parents?”

  “They were too much a part of the community. Everyone loved them. My father gave something to everyone. My mother, too. And she wouldn’t leave them. They told her and told her to get out.”

  “Where would she have gone?”

  My grandmother gestured to somewhere far away. “The day they were supposed to come, the neighbors had warned my parents, and my mother woke Alma up at four in the morning and said, ‘It’s time to go.’ Alma wouldn’t. She’s very stubborn, you know her.”

  “I certainly wouldn’t argue with her,” I agreed. Alma had once hurled a mantel clock out the window at a neighbor who suggested it was unladylike to participate in international athletic competitions.

  Grandma laughed. “Well, just imagine our mother. She was even more stubborn. Finally she just threw Alma out onto the street, told her to run.”

  I tried to imagine this.

  “So she worked her way to Bucharest, as a barmaid, and singing in nightclubs, and dancing. The country was full of Russians. The Russian officers loved her!”

  “Was that a good thing?”

  “Exactly! It was dangerous. Every night they would come and buy her drinks. You know they get very mean if you don’t drink with them. So, every night”—she made the shot glass motion again—“she would take some olive oil before she began to work. They wanted her to go to Moscow and sing for the big generals.”

  “What happened?”

  “She knew that if she went she would be dead before long. So she ran away.”

  “What about your brothers?”

  “Arnold was in Siberia; Werner went to a labor camp when he was fourteen, and then he walked through Turkey to Israel—you know, he could just survive …”

  Her reminiscences drifted further back in time, to her own maternal grandmother. “She knew all about herbs, took care of the sick in her village—the smartest woman around, the best educated. The Orthodox priest would come around every Sunday afternoon, and they would pull the big religious books with the gold edges on the pages off the shelf, and they’d argue for hours in the salon. Such a lovely house,” Grandma continued dreamily. “But when I was a child all of that was gone. We sat on rough wooden benches.”

  “Why?”

  “During the first war the Russians came and burned everything. A tribe of mercenaries. Kalmuks. They took everything outside in a big pile and set it on fire. They loved the books best, the golden sparks the gilt pages made when they burned. Then they went to live in the barn.”

  I blinked, clearing smoke and sparks from my eyes. “The barn?”

  “Sure. They liked it out there. They helped with the animals—they were herders, not professional soldiers, you know. They made the most wonderful cheese.”

  Grandma’s memory had overflowed like a springtime river escaping its banks, and her stories lapped over me. They say a flood makes the world look as it did in the beginning, before the dry land emerged. It seemed to me that her outpouring of memories had dissolved the wide gulf between us and the past, that beside her I could glimpse her grandmother, and her grandmother’s grandmother, and all the worlds each of them contained. I had understood how the war severed my grandmother from her everyday life, relegating it to the bygone and the lost, but now I saw it had also carried away her past—not only loved ones but also advice and instructions, proclivities and inside jokes, books and recipes, trinkets and keepsakes, all her rightful inheritance. For a split second, I saw an infinity of forgotten details dancing across history’s dizzying expanse. Folded into remembrance is the knowledge of all that cannot be recalled: I realized that when my grandparents passed away, I would carry within me not only the memory of them but the memory of their memories, on and on over the horizon of being, back to the tohubohu before the waters parted.

  It was our last night in the Hôtel Dauphiné Provence. The carpet didn’t seem so awful now. I closed the shutters and dimmed the lights, and the green neon sign outside the window flashed on and off through the slats, casting a murky pond-colored glow onto the floor of our room. I helped Grandma undress and slid her nightgown over her head, and we climbed into bed, side by side like two peas in a neon green pod.

  I began to fall asleep. The room, and the carpet, and the green glow receded.

  Then I heard Grandma whisper into the dark. “Camps … you know …”

  I held my breath.

  “… they wanted to put us in camps.”

  The silence pressed in, and I felt my old, familiar panic and despair rearrange themselves into compassion and love for the woman who’d really lived those feelings. I reached under the blankets and took her hand. She held on to me lightly, her fingers soft and cool and familiar, her quiet, sober voice completely different from the exuberant certainty I knew so well. “They killed so many people … we were so frightened … we wouldn’t make it … I was so frightened.” I stroked the smooth skin on her hand, and her grip tightened, almost imperceptibly. “Some words you can’t even say.”

  “I know,” I said, though I was only beginning to, only a little bit. We lay there in the dark together. I imagined the house in La Roche, somber and empty in its shadowy haml
et. Maybe they never meant it to be lived in, I thought. Maybe it’s just a place to hold their ghosts.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  IT WOULD BE AN UNDERSTATEMENT TO SAY THE TRIP to France was a sobering experience. It was hard to feel the same enthusiasm about spending a summer in Alba after seeing my grandmother’s reaction to the place. If life had taught me from an early age that the world was sown with land mines of memory, I now realized that the house in La Roche might be the biggest land mine of them all. But it was too late—our miniature and slightly dweeby artists’ collective, which in the end consisted of two friends and me, had already collected their grants and purchased their plane tickets. I can’t deny having chosen my subject of study—village life in the Middle Ages—a bit as a lovesick teenager chooses a bus route that might take her past the object of her affection, as if reading Georges Duby and the Rule of Saint Benedict could somehow bring me closer to La Roche. But when we got there, I realized once more that it wasn’t just a repository for ghosts and shadows—it was the place my heart had inexplicably and incontestably named as its home.

  Cleaning the house took a day of hard labor, and then it was a pleasant, if primitive, place to live. We had no car, no Internet, and no telephone. To get into or out of the village, we had to walk almost two miles to a bus stop on the side of the highway. I could wax rhapsodic about the passionflower vines growing over the stones, and the breeze blowing off the river, and the forbidding, mysterious view of the castle—all reasons I love Alba, but what I loved best, and still do, was that ineffable and odd sensation of comfort and security I derived from living somewhere that had existed for so long. That, and the isolation, made everything about La Roche seem to exist with more intensity, a kind of potent vitality I had only ever associated with my zestful grandma. Was that why she’d chosen to buy the place?

  La Roche in the summer was blissful. The world seemed far-off and blurry beyond the tiny universe of the village, reminding me of the little habitats I used to construct as a child, not so long ago. It was as if I’d finally managed to enter one of them, and everything around me seemed magnified to a gritty, wonderful complex of simple things, an infinity of details to notice, examine, and enjoy—the taste of bread, the smell of grass, the color of sunshine. I remembered sitting in my grandfather’s car that Sunday I’d first seen the village, wondering what it would be like to take part in the homey beauty of Alba, and now here I was. There was even a gray tabby cat who came around for snuggles from time to time; I gave her milk and imagined myself a life there that was permanent enough to include a cat.