When they got near enough to speak, they gave the code words they would have learned from the village priest, and the man nodded. “Where did you sleep? You can’t have hiked all night.”
When they explained, he whistled softly. “Lucky—you must have gotten there a few minutes after the border patrol knocked off. They closed the road through the pass yesterday afternoon. I saw the guards head home at sunset.” He led them to a primitive cabin used by herders when they grazed their cattle in the summer, which lay abandoned the rest of the year. When he lifted the latch they saw a number of other refugees huddled in near-darkness, including a mother holding a sleeping toddler in her lap. “I’ll be back around nightfall,” he announced to the group. “Everyone be ready.”
“There was a kitchen in the cabin with hard bread, hard cheese, and tea,” my grandmother recalled in an essay.
It seemed heaven. We were soaked to the skin, having marched under heavy rain. We were also dehydrated and starved. After drinking much tea and eating something, we stripped and Armand placed our clothes near the cast iron wood stove, which steamed outwardly while drying the wet clothes. We were assigned a big bed covered with a duvet, into which Erna and I crawled, to fall promptly asleep.
The rain swished and muttered and drummed around the cabin all through the day, and the other refugees slept or spoke in low voices among themselves; the mother occupied the toddler as best she could. Anna drifted in and out of sleep, dreaming that her feet belonged to someone else, that she had put them on backward, that she had left them in the bottom of a well.
Darkness crept into the cabin. Anna opened her eyes and saw the others moving around. It must be time to leave, she thought. She didn’t want to move from the warm spot she had created in the bed.
Everyone started when the smuggler opened the door to the cabin.
He looked from the assembled company to Erna and Anna in the bed. “Time to go,” he called out.
“I’m not leaving,” Erna asserted, calm and put together as always.
The smuggler looked perplexed. “I said, it’s time to go.”
Erna shook her head. “It’s pouring outside. Our clothes aren’t dry, and I think I hurt my ankle on the hike. I’m not ready to move it. I’m staying put. I’ll walk down later.”
The smuggler stared at her.
Anna made up her mind and chimed in. “We’re too weak. I’m not moving either.”
I wonder what went through my grandfather’s head as he watched this exchange. “Armand reluctantly followed our lead,” Grandma recalled, “resisting the curses and threats of the smuggler, who finally left, leaving us three in the cabin.”
Their plans would have been set by then: they were to go to Erna’s cousin’s apartment in Lausanne, then split up. Armand would travel to Zurich, in the hope that his birthplace would be willing to take him back, while Anna and Erna would stay with Erna’s cousin Ria, whose uncle was the mayor of a nearby village. Theoretically, then, Armand could have departed with the smuggler and gone straight to Zurich. But perhaps he balked at the idea of a sudden change in plans and at the thought of the smuggler coming back—or not—for two solitary women. He couldn’t very well leave them now. Besides, how would he have paid the smuggler?
Alone in the cabin, “in heavenly peace … we had a good night, a peaceful, restful day,” with a kerosene lamp throwing eerie shadows on the walls, the sound of the slowing rain lulling them to sleep. The following afternoon, as they were preparing to depart, the door opened, and an unknown person stepped inside, looking as spooked as the three of them felt. “I thought the whole lot of them had been arrested,” he exclaimed. It was another smuggler, come to inspect the cabin after his colleague had been detained with the previous day’s group of refugees (who would subsequently have been deported), or perhaps to close up the shelter until the Swiss border police turned their suspicions elsewhere. Their separation from the group was another terrible miracle to take in stride as they helped this stranger hide the signs of life in the cabin, closed all the shutters, and started down the mountain. The air was chilly and damp, but at least it had stopped raining, which made trudging along the muddy paths and picking their way across icy, swollen mountain streams a little bit easier.
Before they got on the train, they had to pay the smuggler: “We had almost no money, and Erna left a silver tabatière to be recovered when we could pay cash for the smuggler’s services.” My grandmother never forgot the fear of discovery she felt upon reaching that first town. Someone had put her coat too close to the woodstove on their first night in the cabin and singed a large burn into the back. “It made me look like a refugee,” she deplored. “It was so noticeable.” She was careful to stand against walls and sit down whenever she could. In the train, she leaned back and sat still, praying she looked insouciant, natural. “We shared a … compartment with [a group of demobilized border guards], who, in Swiss dialect, told each other that we were Jewish refugees but they were off duty.… In Lausanne, Ria Berger, Erna’s cousin, was at the train station. Another few days of recuperation with food we hadn’t seen for ages in a fine apartment and loving concern. We were in Switzerland, no doubt, and another chapter of my life began.”
I stopped reading. “Another chapter of my life began.” Not our life. My life. My heart beating rapidly, I flipped through their refugee dossiers. I had always thought my grandparents separated more or less against their will upon their arrival in Switzerland. Now I wondered if they’d still been together. I picked up the phone. “Grandma,” I shouted when she answered, “I have an important question for you.”
“Speak up.”
“What happened with you and Grandpa when you crossed the border?”
“What?”
“When you crossed the border into Switzerland,” I repeated, “what did you do?”
“Ria had an uncle, Uncle Sprenger, who was the mayor of a small village. They spent summers at his house when Erna was a girl. And we couldn’t stay with Ria more than a day in Lausanne; it would have looked suspicious, her taking food for three people and using all that water and such. So we went to the uncle, and then he went with us, and we turned ourselves in to the police, and we spent a couple of nights in jail, but he pulled some strings so we weren’t sent back over the border and could be in the same camp together.”
“Who?”
“Ria’s uncle.”
“No, so who could be in the same camp together?”
“Erna and me, of course. It was very damp in that jail, but they had the BBC. I remember we got to listen to the BBC. The first time in the whole war.”
“What about Grandpa?”
“What do you mean?”
“Where was he?”
“He went to Zurich. He was born there.”
“That was it?”
“What?”
“You just left each other?”
“Mirandali, I can’t hear you. You know the phone makes me tired. Write it down. Write it in a letter.”
The next time I visited my grandfather, I took Julien to meet him. We drove to Geneva across the Rhône valley and past the Massif de la Chartreuse, where my grandmother had had her first residency, under and around the edges of the Alps. When we arrived at my grandfather’s apartment, we drank tea and chatted about literature and politics. “He’s a nice young man,” my grandfather pronounced, when Julien was out of earshot.
“I think so, too.”
I remembered my question. “Grandpa, what did you do when you got over the Swiss border? Where did you go?”
“Zurich. I thought I might get some kind of special treatment there because I was born there.”
“Did you?”
“No. They took all my possessions and threw me in jail.”
“In jail?”
He smiled. “It was all right. I was in there with a—how do you say it, a maquereau—”
“A pimp.”
“Yes, a pimp, wearing a fancy suit, who kept conducting his business v
ery loudly from the window of the jail. And a florist. He was very kind. A pacifist—they threw him in jail every year because he wouldn’t perform his military service. We played chess together. And there were some German deserters, too, I remember. I steered clear of them.”
“Then what happened?”
“They sent me to a labor camp.”
“What was that like?”
Grandpa looked sad and dreamy. “It was on the floor of some sort of abandoned factory. Iron beds with straw mattresses. And I remember they would call us in the morning, and we had to assemble in the stairs and wash up outside. In the winter you had to break the ice in the washbasins.”
“Where was my grandmother? Do you know where my grandmother was? Did you write to her?”
“Of course not. How could I know where she was?”
“Maybe there was nothing,” I said to Julien on the way back from Geneva. “Maybe they were never in love. Maybe they ended up together for no good reason at all and then stayed together because they felt bad about leaving each other.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know, maybe they just happened to be sort of dating, and then the war broke out, and they just happened to continue to be together, and then they were stuck.” I fidgeted in the passenger’s seat, feeling melancholy and out of sorts, ashamed I had ever blown their story into anything more than it was, ashamed to have romanticized anything about that horrible time. “I mean, why should they have a special reason to be together? Or apart? Why does anyone get together or break apart? Does anyone ever know?”
“I know why I’m with you.”
“Why?”
“What does your dad like to say? ‘Cause you look so cute when you get riled up,’ ” he said in English, putting on a silly American cowboy voice.
“Thank you, Rock Hudson.”
Julien took a hand off the wheel and stroked my hair. “Really, since when is this about reason? You think they had a reason? We’re talking about feelings here. Did you have a rational reason to take up with me?”
“Sure. Indoor plumbing.” I opened the window all the way and pushed my hand against the air. “I think war makes you crazy. I think that’s it. They’re just another casualty of a goddamn genocide.”
I put away all the letters, papers, and notes. It was early November, and my grant money was almost gone. In less than a month, I would no longer have any legal residency status in France, and I’d have to return to the United States. I decided to spend my last weeks in France enjoying my time with Julien.
So we shopped for groceries, fed the cats, read the paper, watched movies, argued, made up, listened to the news, caught colds and recovered from them, went for walks, ate dinner by ourselves, ate dinner with friends. As the weather got colder, we cooked soup, built fires in the fireplace, and added blankets to the bed. The cats crept inside at night. And despite my unfinished story and unanswered questions, I felt the same uncurling motion in my heart that I’d felt in the pool that summer. Through all of it, I kept thinking, I am happy.
Finally, one day, I received word that the terrace door, custom-made to Julien’s specifications, was ready. We borrowed a truck to pick it up, and I paid everything I had saved to make sure the house in La Roche could be shut securely around its emptiness.
That weekend it froze for the first time. It was so cold on the north side of La Roche that Julien was worried his mortar wouldn’t set. My grandmother would have said that the sun was shining through clenched teeth, a Romanian expression she loved. We drove the door down to La Roche and carried it to the house. When we opened the door and felt an exhalation of cool air from the dark interior, it was difficult to imagine I had been living there just a couple of months before.
In the living room, we rested the door against the wall while Julien pulled the broken door off its hinges and pried the rotting wood of the doorframe away from the house’s stone wall. He drove nails into the soft mortar on the inside of the now empty opening, and then we brought the door outside and leaned it against the blackberry cane already growing up again through the terrace tiles. He drove more nails into the new doorframe, then set the door and frame into the stone opening, using thick steel wire to twine together the nails on the doorframe and the nails in the wall’s opening, checking with his level after every twist to make sure he was setting it straight. I brought him buckets of water, and he mixed a wheelbarrow full of mortar, which he used to fill the space around the doorframe, throwing it off the back of his trowel with easy, precise motions. Then he smoothed it all out, and we stood back to admire his handiwork.
It was beautiful. Looking at the honey-colored wood and the clear glass panes set into the speckled stones, I saw for the first time what the house might be like if I did manage to rescue it. For a moment, I forgot the cold, the dust, and my grandparents’ bad blood and felt the same longing that had made me swear to myself all those years ago that I would make this place my home. And then, just as it had in June, the first time I’d sat by myself on the terrace wall, the enormous contrast between my fantasy and the house’s reality clamped down on me, and I wondered how I could ever have believed that getting doors and windows on the place would make it less of a ruin or teach me anything about my family history.
Julien turned away from the door and began assembling his tools. Wistfully, I admired his work for a moment longer and then went to help him.
“Thanks for doing this. I’m a bit of a busman’s holiday for you, aren’t I?”
“Here.” He handed me an empty bucket and his level. “We can take everything to my mom’s house and rinse it off in her garden.” He straightened up and winked. “Not a problem, by the way. It’s never a bad idea to make a pretty girl feel obligated to you.”
I took the tools from him. “Very chivalrous.”
“At your service, milady,” Julien said, packing his leftover mortar around a loose stone in the terrace wall.
I set the tools in the wheelbarrow, feeling like an arctic explorer who’d just discovered that the north pole was a figment of her imagination—that the house could be my home, that my grandparents’ relationship had ever contained so much as a spark of tenderness. From far off, Anna and Armand’s love had shone like a blaze of starlight. Closer study had revealed the glow of a single bedraggled candle and two people thrown together by a terrible set of circumstances, who, through some strange lapse of judgment, ended up marrying and purchasing a rotting house.
As I looked at the dark ruins, it occurred to me that I’d gotten the nature of my grandparents’ fairy tale all wrong, or rather had failed to recognize its true meaning and message. After all, there is no love in most fairy tales; they are better characterized as sad and cruel. All but one of Bluebeard’s wives are killed; Cinderella turns into a princess, but her stepsisters’ eyes are pecked out by pigeons; Little Red Riding Hood gets eaten by the wolf—and those are the nicer ones. I’d been exposed to too many Disney movies, I decided, feeling abashed. Real fairy tales are about calamity. Julien had been right, that day at Le Camping: I was a romantic, trying to pretty up affliction, to streamline and simplify the grotesque, to make a love story where there was none, out of a little silver dish and some painful twists of fate. I looked around me. La Roche certainly seemed like the perfect setting for a fairy tale, with its crazy wrecked castle perched on an elderly plug of hardened magma, its cicadas, and its lazy river running over ancient stones.
“You okay?” Julien interrupted my musings.
“I guess. I was thinking about fairy tales.”
“I told you that first day at Le Camping. You’re a romantic.”
“That’s what I was thinking about. It made me mad at the time.”
Julien grinned. “You know I love it when you get mad.”
“Actually, what I was going to say is I think you might be right.”
“I like it even better when I’m right,” Julien teased. “Now, if you will just help me load all these tools into the wheelbarrow, I wil
l take you home and show you what a real Prince Charming can do.” He winked.
“What, now I’m some sort of damsel in distress?”
He waved his trowel in a curlicue motion and bowed, then tossed his trowel into the wheelbarrow, retrieved his tape measure and level, and picked up the old door. “Grab that wheelbarrow,” he instructed.
“I thought I was a damsel in distress.”
“Well, studies show that shoving a wheelbarrow around is the first step to recovery.”
We locked the house and loaded the tools into his car. The sun had begun warming the day. The frost made the vines and the grass sparkle like an illustration in a children’s book. A bird called out from somewhere on La Roche. Behind that new terrace door, the house was gray and cold, settled in for another long slumber. And up the hill in Alba, there was a fire in the fireplace, soup for dinner, cats on the sofa—a home. Julien is my home now, I realized. And then sadness crept over me again, because in a few days, I would have to leave him, too.
PART III
A photo of my grandparents found in my grandfather’s papers after this book’s manuscript was completed, dated July 12, 1944—their wedding day.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
IN DECEMBER 2004 I RETURNED TO ASHEVILLE FOR three months in order to apply for a visa at the French consulate in Atlanta, hoping to spend another year in France. I still clung to the idea that an additional twelve months would represent nothing more than an extension of this parenthetical period of my life. I believed I would return to America soon enough, pick up the thread I’d dropped when I graduated from college. I hadn’t measured—or even fully acknowledged—how potent that feeling of homecoming had been the first time I set foot in Alba. I didn’t realize how far I’d proceeded along the path Grandma had laid for me. A second year to finish my book and spend more time with Julien didn’t seem like much of a commitment, no more than the first year had.
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