I asked if I could get a pail of water, some soap, a broom and rags and maybe a hammer and nails to drive into the wall for hanging up a few of my belongings as there was neither an armoire nor a chest of drawers, after I had cleaned the rooms. Mme. F. stared at me, collected what was on the bed, saying the mattress wasn’t too bad and she’ll give me bedding. I don’t know if it was then and there, that what I later on called the “university of my life” started. Surely without my war experiences I couldn’t have become the person I am today. I followed Mme. F. downstairs and this time into the kitchen with a large open hearth, where cooking was done on tripods supporting the soot-stained pots. A very large table and chairs stood on the dirt floor. A sink with running cold water was placed under large South-oriented windows. I got the pail filled in the sink, was given a large piece of soap (savon de Marseille, the best in France) as well as plenty of clean rags. I can’t remember how many trips up and down and how many rags it took to remove the dirt and dust, air the mattress, and organize the room. Mme. F., huffing and puffing up the stairs, brought me coarse, but very white and fragrant sheets and even a bedspread. She admired—with looks, no words—my accomplishment. I asked about the price and with full pension, three meals, it was five francs a day, if I looked otherwise totally after myself. I was determined to stay as at this price my meager savings could last quite a while. I understood that Mme. F. was regarded by the villagers as an outsider and opportunist. She seemed well intentioned toward me, saw me also as an outsider, not being a French citizen.
In the dark, dusty house in La Roche, the green streetlight lit the room just enough to make me feel like a little lost creature shivering at the bottom of a murky sea. I reassured myself by imagining my grandmother in the hot June night, looking around at the temporary home she’d made for herself, the noise and movement in the café ebbing and flowing around her until she dropped off into uncertain sleep. And I pictured Grandma now, lying in her own soft bed in her house in Pearl River, and how proud she would be that I had come all this way, had come to reclaim the house she’d bought so long ago. I felt a little wriggle of belonging, however insecure, and clung to it fiercely.
Just then Grant woke up and pushed open the front room door to go to the bathroom. Seconds later he backed into the room again and shut the door with a bang. “There’s a crowd out there.”
“A crowd?”
“I mean not people, but a crowd. Of …”
“I know,” I replied, without thinking. “But they’re friendly.”
“You know? You can feel them, too?”
I rubbed my eyes and tried to consider this question rationally, then gave up, since it was clearly not a rational question. “Yes, I can. I mean, I know they’re there.”
“I can feel them looking at me. Looking me over.” He shuddered.
“They want us to be here.” I pulled Grant’s coat around the dissipating warmth at my middle. “They’re just checking you out.”
“I’m going to pee in a jar. I’m not going out there.”
“No, I’ll go with you.” I got up, clutching the coat around me, and we returned to the hall together. While I waited for Grant, I wondered what it would be like for that sensation to be surprising, to not constantly feel the past crowding around you.
The next morning, over hot coffee in the sunshine on the terrace, we could almost forget the house’s ugly, broken-down insides. Grant and I sat soaking up the light and warmth of the day and debated about what we should do next, given that we had no tools, no car, and no money.
At the time I was convinced it was possible for me to reach into the past and feel the contours of my grandmother’s experiences, but I now imagine the opposite was true. I see Grandma’s spirit reaching forward, across time and space, to help me make a home for myself. On that particular day in April, help came in the form of Youssef, a handyman I knew from the brief trip to Alba I’d made during the summer I’d spent conducting thesis research in Avignon. Youssef is a man who seems to subsist on nothing at all: no one knows where he is or when he will be there; he is rarely where you expect him to be; and he is always present when you aren’t aware you need him. Now that I have actually established a home for myself in Alba, I rarely see him. When I do, he barely stops for a hurried hello. But back then, when I had nothing and knew no one, Youssef appeared out of nowhere and helped. He brought tools to scrape the broken glass out of the window frames, plastic to cover them, and kindling for the fireplace. And most important of all, though I didn’t realize it at the time, Youssef invited us over the little footbridge that spanned the Escoutay River to the “Le Camping,” Alba’s campground, which had an outdoor café and restaurant on a big shady terrace. Things have changed now, but back then it was where people went to grab coffee or a sandwich during the day, or to have a drink after work or on the weekends. Youssef introduced us to everyone he knew, including Yohann, the owner, who offered to let me use the showers when he heard the house in La Roche didn’t have hot water.
The plastic on the windows made the house feel less exposed to the elements, but it was still too cold to inhabit. At the end of the week, Grant went back to his teaching job, and I returned to Avignon. Until his departure from France in June, he met me almost every weekend in Alba, usually with one or two friends in tow. When I had visitors from the States, I brought them along, as well. I usually woke up earlier than the others, and cooking breakfast, I’d feel a little like a lady in a mining camp, ladling out porridge and hot coffee to our grimy little crew. Within our limited means, we’d work on making the place more habitable, but also we’d just goof off, walking as far as we could along the dry rocks that littered the bed of the Escoutay River, dancing around the terrace in the late spring rain, playing improvised midnight baseball on the path behind La Roche. The nice thing about rural France, of course, is that you can eat like an empress, even if you are living in a glorified rock pile. We’d cook big dinners, drink wine, and listen to music on a little clock radio Grant had donated to the house, or head across the river to hang out at the campground.
When I tired of jug showers and sleeping in the cold (though I did acquire a sleeping bag after those first awful nights), I’d trek back to Avignon for a nice long bath and a night free of spiders and scorpions. As I began to get to know people in the village, I thought often of my grandmother settling into Caudiès and of the adamant advice she had always given me: “You just have to talk to people. It’s how you sourrwvive.”
At first, my grandmother spoke only with Madame Flamand, sitting with her in the cool, dim kitchen and helping her with the housework and meals: “To find out if I was a legitimate doctor Mme. F. steered every woman and child with complaints (never men) toward me. She was later on told I must be one, from the way I asked questions and examined them.” In this way, my grandmother made this strange village into something of a home, putting down tiny, tentative roots as she cared for her new neighbors. I wondered what it had felt like to write to her boss with her address so he could ship her possessions to her, whether the pleasure of unpacking her trunks and recovering her bicycle was overshadowed by the pain of losing the position she’d loved so much.
My grandmother had jotted these memories on yellowed scrap paper, in an essay she said was inspired by “the reading of Robert Hughes’s Barcelona.” The clearer-than-usual explanations made me think she must have submitted it to a writing teacher who’d taken the time to edit and ask questions. And for once, I was amazed to see, she not only admitted she had written to my grandfather but even elaborated on how he’d come to visit her in Hauteville after the evacuation of Strasbourg and before reporting for the draft.
This being my grandmother’s essay, she segued directly into a story that would have repercussions for her and Armand even after they moved away from Caudiès, about the time she’d been summoned in the middle of the night to care for the local gendarme, who’d been injured in a motorcycle accident. “He was lying in the middle of the road, crying out lou
dly with pain. Because of the blackout and faint moon, the assembled crowd appeared in black shadows, as did the vehicles.” I pictured her feeling around in the dark for her stethoscope and listening to his elevated heart rate, placing both hands flat on either side of his chest. When he inhaled, one side of his chest would have fallen under her hand: bad fractures, possibly fatal, if she didn’t immobilize them. “It’s going to hurt,” she would have warned him, working fast, calling out to the crowd for extra clothing to roll up and wedge under him. With no straps or blankets handy, it is likely she had to turn him with his own jacket, placing the bulk of the extra clothing below the broken ribs, then pulling the sleeves of his jacket to keep him pinned still until the ambulance came. “I explained all this to the gendarme, whose face I never saw, heard only his voice and got to know his chest under my examining hands.” Another man to spark my grandfather’s jealousy. “Much later I found out that my diagnosis was confirmed in the hospital and he was considered lucky that I had been able to be so precise and save him,” my grandmother concluded. “He and another gendarme in St. Paul (where I moved subsequently with Armand) kept us off deportation lists.”
The essay’s last two sentences, the first irritatingly loopy and long, the second concise and subtly self-critical, made me miss her terribly:
Myself come from landed Jews—my parents being the first generation in town; on both sides my grandparents were village people keeping a general store in their respective hamlets, but their main interests were in the fields and cattle they owned—I had often participated in field activities and had listened to lengthy interchanges about crops, barnyard residents (hens, ducks, geese, turkeys), how to save their offspring when in trouble and such. Thus I never held back with advice to villagers about such matters.
Homesick for a bit of that unsolicited advice, which had reassured me in childhood and aggravated me as a teenager, I picked up the phone and called her. “I just wanted to hear your voice,” I shouted, when she answered.
“Well, here I am, still alive.”
“I should hope so!”
“Well, at my age, you never know. It’s interesting, in a way, to watch your body shut down,” she observed cheerfully.
I did not feel like shouting about her body shutting down, and I was sure she didn’t either. “I have lots to tell you,” I hollered. “About Alba. I’ll write you a letter.”
“VAT? Write it in a letter, Mirandali. You know I can’t hear you.”
“That’s what I said, I’m going to write.”
“Very good.”
“I just called to say I love you, and I miss you,” I went on, but she had already hung up the phone.
With each visit to Geneva, every few weeks, I cleaned out my grandfather’s refrigerator and worried about his decline. I taped index cards with my phone number on every available surface, so Grandpa would remember to call me if something happened, and every time I departed, he took them all down, giving us something to do and discuss before we settled in for tea on the next visit.
Grandpa seemed to be on a fig kick; this time, once again, he put out figs to have with our tea, and just as before, something in the sticky gypsy sweetness at the back of his mouth sparked a story. At first I thought it was the same tale, and I felt disappointed, both for the sake of my curiosity and the sake of his failing memory, but I kept quiet, just in case he added a new detail.
“We ate a lot of figs during the war. I remember walking south to”—he thought better of whatever he was about to say and altered the direction of his sentence—“walking south after I was discharged and picking figs to eat.” We chewed our own figs in silence, and he added, “They make you sleepy, you know. But you have to be careful, if you’re napping outside.”
“Careful of what?”
“Well, for example, you have to pick the right tree. You must never sleep under a walnut tree.”
“Why?”
“It gives you a headache.”
“Really?”
The look on his face hinted that high umbrage was not far-off. “Why would I tell you so if it weren’t true?”
Before, his tone of voice would have stopped me in my tracks. Now I just changed tack. “What did you do during the war?”
“Waited around, mostly, with the Chasseurs … the fighting was all in the north, you know. I was transferred to the Tirailleurs marocains when they found out I was Jewish. And then I was discharged.”
“Where did you go afterward?”
“To the Pyrénées-Orientales. I had a job there, picking grapes, and a place to stay.” He finished his fig, took a last sip of tea, and picked up the leather pouch that held his pipe.
“With Madame Flamand?”
My grandfather stiffened. “How do you know that name?”
Everything I knew about Madame Flamand I knew from my grandmother, but I wanted to delay Grandpa’s rage for as long as possible, so I prevaricated a little. “I—I heard you mention it once.”
Grandpa cupped his left hand around the bowl of his pipe, a pinch of tobacco between his right thumb and forefinger. “Of course I knew her. She was a fine woman, a Spanish anarchist. After the war I tried to go visit her, to thank her—I drove down; I wanted to give her some flowers. But she was dead.” All was quiet. I worried that he would begin to weep, and we would have to sit in our painful remembering silence, but he went on, in a detached, absent voice: “Her daughter was there. But she didn’t seem particularly interested in all of that.”
“Did you live with her?”
“With whom?”
“With Madame Flamand?”
“Yes, of course I did.” He looked at me as if I were mildly touched, as if to say, Where else would I have lived? “She had a sort of an inn, I think, we rented.” That rare and fugitive we! I waited with bated breath, but Grandpa caught himself. “One could rent a room,” he amended. “I worked in the grape harvest.” He went back to packing his pipe and made a small uncomfortable motion with his shoulders.
I thought I’d take a little risk. “That’s why they didn’t send you back to Morocco, right? Because she sent you an exemption saying you were needed for the harvest.”
“Who sent me an exemption?”
“Madame Flamand—and my grandmother.”
“How could she have sent me anything? I had no address.”
“What about a military base?”
“It was the end of the war,” he asserted irritably. “Everything was in chaos.” He reached for his matches, lit his pipe, and inhaled quietly. A puff of fragrant smoke escaped into the room. “They discharged me with five hundred francs and a certificate saying I’d fulfilled my military service. They’d taken my papers at the beginning of the war—they said I would be a citizen when my military service was over.”
“Were you?”
“Of course not.” He drew on his pipe. “No, of course not. But they had taken my papers, and when I went to recover them, they were gone.”
“Gone?”
“Mislaid, no longer valid—I can’t remember exactly.” He made the same vague, uncomfortable motion with his shoulders. “All this is in the past.” He pushed his empty teacup away from him, put his pipe back in his mouth, and looked out the window at the mountains. The conversation was over.
As I washed up after tea, I pictured Armand trudging down a long road through the hot summer of 1940, with his feet sweltering inside his boots and socks, his tongue parched in his mouth, thinking of cool water. I imagined in him a dry, expansive longing for my grandmother that exceeded even his great thirst. I imagined him imagining her and feeling a certain tension pressing out from inside of him, a little ache, an always emptiness. One foot in front of the other down the hot dry road with a memory of her dark, soft hair between his fingers. In my mind’s eye, sometimes he would pick up speed, lashed along by his passion to have the whole of her. I liked the idea that she hadn’t written to him at all, liked to think my grandmother acted upon my grandfather as north spins a compas
s needle. But probably she was the one who was right, and he simply had her address because she’d sent it to him. Either way, my grandfather would have been hurrying through the middle of a plain hot day that did not yet know what part of history it would become. He was headed to Caudiès because Anna was there, and he was hurrying because he had nowhere else to go.
In my mind, Caudiès was a place the color of cornbread, where the high sun turned the stone buildings into black shadows of themselves. Inside Madame Flamand’s café it would have been dim as the inside of a rain barrel, and I imagined Armand ducking his head as he opened the door and walked in, blinking in the light, looking around at this new strange home.
In their first night together at Madame Flamand’s, they would have lain in wakeful silence, listening to each other’s breathing, acclimating to each other’s presence. Looking at the accordion of sky and weatherworn wood made by the shutter, they glimpsed the blacked-out heavens pierced by chinks of light, a multitude of stars clustered as thick as the nerves in their restless, sweaty bodies. In the soft heat, with the silky, dim moon lighting up their skin in little luminous stripes, they would have stared at each other in wonder.
I set the teacups in the drainboard and looked out the window, realizing as I did that shutter slats point down, to keep out the rain, and they wouldn’t have been able to see the sky at all. I shook my head, feeling defeated. What other mistakes had I fantasized into their story?
By the end of June, it was warm enough to move out of my room in Avignon and live in La Roche full-time, on my own. Grant had finished his teaching job and returned to the United States, and I didn’t have any more visitors scheduled for a while. David helped pack my belongings into his car and drove me there. He had donated a mirror, a potted petunia, a teapot, and some mugs to my new home, but when he saw the place, he exclaimed, “My God, I should have given you a cement mixer and a tool belt. Are you sure you’ll be all right?”
A Fifty-Year Silence: Love, War, and a Ruined House in France Page 12
