Now, though, my need to inhabit my grandmother’s skin, to project myself into her younger self and imagine when she would have had the time to think about my grandfather, to reach out to him, to return to him, made me understand her objections to my calling her a hero. The war had not vaulted her into some special state of being; it had not banished her quotidian self. Her headaches were headaches; her fatigue was fatigue. The cold she felt during the war was not any more—or less—cold than the cold she’d felt during any other period in her life. The beauty of the mountains around her was neither enhanced nor diminished by her current circumstances. She wanted that to be true, in any case. History had robbed her of her right to be ordinary, and she was protesting that injustice.
Maybe that’s why they couldn’t let go of each other: they each held within themselves the memory of who the other person was before the war made them remarkable in ways they had not chosen.
Though I was beginning to lose hope that I ever would find anything to illuminate the mystery of their love and estrangement, I kept combing through the refugee files for any indication that my grandparents had at least crossed paths. With my shaky grasp of German, it was hard to be sure, but as far as I could tell, there was only one recorded instance of my grandparents being in the same place during their time in Switzerland. In May 1944 the chief of police in Bern had written to the Bureau of Civil Internees in Geneva:
Sirs,
We hereby confirm our telephone conversation of earlier today and ask that you grant permission to the following persons to go to “Mösli,” near Zurich, on May 27, 28, and 29, 1944, to participate in a conference of the Oeuvre Suisse d’Entraide Ouvrière:
No. 7808 Mr. Armand Jacoubovitch, born June 13, 1915
c/o Berchtold, 14, Cours de Rive
No. 7130, Miss Anna Münster, born August 8, 1913
c/o Berchtold, 14, Cours de Rive
That was something. As of May 26, 1944, my grandparents lived at the same address. In my faltering German (and with some outside help), I puzzled through the letters that had been written around that date. This time, my patience was rewarded.
July 23, 1944
To: the Swiss Federal Police Offices, Bern
Re: Deposit at the Schweizer Volksbank
In payment for my work at the Sanatorium Sursum in Davos a deposit of 95 Swiss francs was made in my account at the Schweizer Volksbank. Please release this entire amount to me. I make this request because I was married in Geneva last July 12th. Leave to do so was granted so suddenly that I had no time to apply to you to release the necessary funds. My friends placed the necessary funds at my disposal for immediate expenses such as a dress, shoes, and some undergarments, and I must now reimburse them. The receipts for these purchases are available for your inspection at any time.
Please consider that I am in these circumstances because I have been in Switzerland for some 20 months with nothing more than the clothes I had on my back when I crossed the border, and that I badly need to purchase further undergarments, stockings, etc.; so I ask you to disburse me the entire amount I have on deposit.
I thank you in advance for your help and remain respectfully yours,
Dr. Anna Jacoubovitch-Münster
In their entire refugee dossier—hundreds of pages—this letter was the only mention of my grandparents’ marriage. But whether they wed for love, loyalty, or my grandmother’s beautiful black hair, at least now I knew the date: July 12, 1944.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
IT WAS JANUARY 2006, AND ALMOST A YEAR HAD passed since my return to France and the triumphant discovery of that wedding date. I’d waitressed a full season at the Petite Chaumière and taught a semester at the high school in Le Teil. My teaching contract would end in a few months, and when it did, my visa would expire again. Julien and I were sitting in bed in his house on the rue du Code in Alba. We’d done a lot of work on it that year, opening up an office area for me at the top of the stairs, building storage shelves and a countertop, adding a couple of closets, replacing the stove, and planting roses and geraniums alongside the forsythia, honeysuckle, lilac, and oleander. To me, the little house felt like a cozy storybook home, tall and narrow and paneled with wood, like the inside of a tree or a Beatrix Potter illustration inhabited by friendly hedgehogs or chatty field mice. It made me sad to think about leaving again. “What are our options?” Julien asked.
“Well,” I proposed, “I could go back to the States and do this all over again—find another job, or reapply for the teaching program and wait another three months.”
“Or?”
I stared at my hands. “Well, if I start looking now, there’s always the chance I could find a job from here that comes with a visa.”
“But you’d still have to go back and apply for the visa from there, wouldn’t you?”
I nodded. “Yeah, I think so.”
Julien poked me and smiled. “Isn’t there another option?”
In spite of myself, I smiled, too. “Yes.”
“Which is?”
“Which is … we could get married.”
“We could.”
“We could,” I confirmed. “Just like the consulate guy told us to.”
In mid-April 2005, after I learned that my work visa had been approved, I flew back to the States to pick it up, in time to celebrate my stepfather’s seventy-first birthday, on May 23. My stepfather was what the French would call mon papa de coeur, my “heart-father.” I called him “Abah,” which means “Daddy” in Hebrew. In my later childhood, he had been the most present of my parents, the one who cooked me breakfast, shuttled me to and from school, and waited up for me at night. He was the rock in my life, my very definition of stability. The week I bought my ticket to Asheville, Abah had lost function in his left arm and went to see a neurologist for a battery of tests. By May 23 we knew he had a deadly brain tumor. That trip was the last time I saw him upright.
I returned to Alba for six weeks, during which Julien and I worked so much we barely saw each other, I as a waitress on lunch and dinner shifts and he on a project that required him to be at work before six in the morning. By the time I got home at night, he was asleep, and he left for his job long before I woke up.
The Internet had recently come to Alba, and one day, on a break between shifts, I thought to look up the Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names on the Yad Vashem website.
I entered my grandfather’s family name, and more than a thousand records appeared. I went back and entered my great-grandmother’s first name as well, which narrowed the search results to 167. Feeling a familiar chill, I searched through the list until I came to a woman from Strasbourg. I clicked the name and saw a dim image of my great-grandmother on a page of testimony submitted by my grandfather’s eldest brother. I followed a link to the other pages he had submitted. There were my great-grandparents, my grandfather’s sister-in-law, Rose, and Paul, her son. Rose had been deported in Convoy Number 8, on July 20, 1942, when she was twenty-eight. Gitla and Leon had been deported in Convoy Number 45, on November 11, 1942, the very day Anna had returned from her visit with Rosie and spent the night in Perpignan with her accidental savior, the very day the Germans invaded the French Free Zone.
I typed “Convoy No. 45, November 11, 1942, Auschwitz” into the search engine, which brought me to Serge and Beate Klarsfeld’s memorial, “Chronological Table of Deportation Convoys.” Convoy Number 45 was sent from Drancy to Auschwitz carrying 745 people, 634 adults and 111 children. Five hundred and ninety-nine were gassed on arrival, and two were alive when the camp was liberated in 1945. I sat back from the computer screen, as if the numbers might reach out and pull me into one of the nightmares I so feared.
If this was a fairy tale, then I was Little Red Riding Hood, crossing into the dark wood at whose edges I had grown up, whose shadows had tinged my grandmother’s stories and ringed the light cast by the Shabbat candles at my grandfather’s table. Perhaps my grandparents’ strange silence and byzantine story were mere
ly an effort to prevent me from going down that path, straight into the mouth of the wolf. I felt ashamed of my illusions about love affairs and ruined houses. Tables, lines, numbers; Convoy 45, November 11, 1942: this was the weight I was supposed to carry.
Abah’s tumor symptoms worsened, and Julien and I took time off from our jobs to return to Asheville and help my family care for him. The Sunday before we were supposed to leave, Julien’s maternal grandmother died. We booked a train to Paris for the next day, so we could be at the funeral, where I met most of Julien’s family for the first time. We mourned his grandmother, then boarded the plane to Asheville, where we spent the rest of the summer with Abah as the tumor laid waste to him. He died on August 21, 2005.
After the funeral, I surrendered to my grief. I hacked off all my hair. I wept a lot. I shut down. I couldn’t bear to be touched. And I whirled dangerously close to a Charybdis of guilt over leaving my mother, who had been chronically ill since my early teenage years. Somehow she had pulled herself together to care for Abah, with astonishing force and energy, but now she was all alone, and I was terrified that if I left her, she would wilt like a vine without a stake to cling to. By some strange miracle of synchronicity, my return flight to France with Julien had been booked for the day following Abah’s memorial service, and as it approached, I was overcome with self-reproach. Wondering whether I should stay, I caused an explosion in my relationship with Julien, one of the few we’ve ever had.
“You can’t take care of everyone forever,” he exclaimed. “Your grandfather, your father, your mother—who’s next? Who will be after that? When is it your turn?”
“But they need me.”
“I need you, too,” Julien objected. The two of us were sitting in the car, on our way to pick up some MRI scans that had been taken too late to be of any use or interest. “And more important, you need you. What’s it going to be? At some point, you’re going to have to live your own life.”
Unbidden, a memory of a moment a week or two before Abah’s death floated into my head, when Abah could no longer move or speak and Julien and I were sitting by him as he lay in a hospital bed in my parents’ room. Julien had brought Abah roses from the garden, twining them onto his oxygen tube so he could smell a little bit of summer. The roses looked like a boutonniere, and I couldn’t help thinking of all the times Abah and I had talked about what my wedding would be like, idly, with no special person in mind, just because we liked celebrations. Once he’d asked me whether I would make him wear a tux for the ceremony, and I’d told him he could wear whatever he wanted. “Maybe I’ll wear one,” he’d said. “Maybe it’ll be hot pink.” We’d laughed because we’d both have gotten exactly the same kick out of a hot pink tuxedo. Now, holding his hand as he lay in bed with a posy of roses fading over the pocket of his T-shirt, which also happened to be hot pink, I saw with brutal finality that he would never be at my wedding. And then I looked across the bed at Julien, steadfast and caring as he gripped my father’s other hand, and I thought, Maybe this is stronger than walking down the aisle. There are other consecrations than a wedding. Maybe this is one of them.
So I got on that flight with Julien. We went back to Alba and continued the process of braiding our lives together. I worked my jobs. I waited to surface from my grief. I didn’t write anymore. I sat next to our new woodstove and read novels or stared into space. I corresponded with my grandmother about the minutiae of our daily lives. On my trips to Geneva, I watched over my grandfather’s worsening forgetfulness, wondering when I was going to have to intervene and what exactly I would do when the time came.
Now, sitting in bed with Julien on that January night in 2006, I thought over the whole sad, hard year, the bad storms our relationship had withstood. And I remembered the night when we held my father’s hand and watched the roses move up and down on his chest. Life has already married us, I thought. Our happiness has been weatherproofed.
We turned to face each other, smiling big, uncontrollable smiles.
“I know this is serious,” Julien said.
“It is,” I agreed, still smiling.
“What do you think?”
“I’m not sure there’s anything to think about. If you see what I mean. What do you think?”
“Well,” reasoned Julien, “if I’m going to spend the rest of my life with someone, and I’m going to have children with them—then that person is clearly you.”
“I feel the same way.”
“Well, there you go.”
“All right.”
So that was that. We turned out the lights, snuggled down against each other, and went to sleep.
Julien and I were married on March 25, 2006, seventy years after my grandparents met, almost sixty years after they bought the house in La Roche, some fifty years after they ceased speaking to each other forever, and nine years after my grandfather first brought me to Alba. “To think that house I bought so long ago brought you to the love of your life,” Grandma wrote.
Wonders never cease.… You have my blessings and prayers for a good outcome!… I continue to wonder what I am still doing here, the only highlights being your mother’s and your existence, as well as the wonder of a purchase, made on a dreary November day, that led to an alliance.… Strange and miraculous at the same time, which brings up questions of destination and predestination and such.
By then Julien and I had made a lot of decisions about our future, notably that it was time to leave Alba for Paris. I found a job as a translator. Julien, once he had finished his projects in the Ardèche, would begin work at a company in Versailles that restored historical monuments. Our wedding crowned and concluded our time in the village, marking the beginning of a whole new life.
We got married at the Alba town hall, the same town hall I’d once sat in front of while my grandfather voted. Now it was filled with people we loved. Julien’s mother sang, and everyone joined in:
Dodi li
My beloved is mine
Va’ani lo
And I am his.
Haro’eh, bashoshanim.
Who pastures among the lilies.
When she had finished, the mayor cleared his throat several times and blew his nose loudly. “I’ve watched Julien grow up, you might say, with particular interest. He’s a fine young man, with a fine set of parents, a fine future ahead of him. And I remember Miranda’s grandfather from when I was just a teenager—when I saw her here for the first time, I thought, I know she’s coming home. Young people are the life of our village, and when I look at these two, I feel confident in our future. It seems only right,” he concluded, “to be marrying them—two of the village’s children—and I couldn’t be more pleased.”
He read aloud the French civil ceremony, and Julien and I exchanged rings and signed the paper that made us husband and wife.
“Now for the best part,” the mayor announced. Julien and I kissed, and the room filled with whoops, hollers, and claps; a musician friend began to play, and everyone spilled out onto the town hall steps in a melodic springtime hubbub.
We ate, drank, and danced all night, and the music seeped out of the stone walls, into the streets, across the vineyards, down to La Roche, to hide in the chinks of the darkened house among the shadows. I imagined another generation of dreams and intentions coming to rest in that abandoned place, abandoned to time and unknown to all but those who’d left them there. If Grandma was willing to accept that life unfolds slowly and mysteriously, across many decades, then I would, too. The house was not for me. My grandparents’ secret was not mine. And maybe that was all right.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
A WEEK AFTER OUR WEDDING MY GRANDFATHER’S neighbor called me. “I think you need to come quickly. I ran into your grandfather in the elevator, and he told me he’s being evicted.”
I arrived in Geneva the next day to find Grandpa sitting at his dining room table in a snowdrift of papers.
“They keep saying I haven’t paid the rent. They say they’re going to throw me out
of the apartment if I don’t pay. Those dogs. I know I paid, I know I did.” He gestured in mute frustration at the papers on the table, then looked up at me. “Can you do something?”
In the silence that followed his question, I understood he had been pretending for a long time, and I’d wanted so much for him to be all right that I’d let him. He’d done nothing with the carefully ordered piles and to-do lists I’d made him—nothing but hide them away. I took a week off from my job and set to work, locating old bills, late rent notices, letters from collection agencies, and empty tax forms. I dragged loads of papers—newspapers, discarded mail, circulars, magazines, newsletters—to the recycling bins, fascinated by the flotsam that churned up as I sorted: a letter I’d written him when I was eleven (corrected, of course); wedding invitations, obituaries, pictures of the babies of unknown friends; ancient birthday cards. And everywhere, battered photocopies of that poem he’d sent me all those years ago.
It is late last night the dog was speaking of you;
the snipe was speaking of you in her deep marsh.
It is you are the lonely bird through the woods;
and that you may be without a mate until you find me.
Sometimes my grandfather hovered and watched me work; at other times, he retired to his sitting room and leafed through a book of poetry or read the newspaper. Whenever I told him what I was about to do—file his papers, engage an accountant, settle a bill with a collection agency—I cringed, expecting him to lash out at me. But he said nothing. I waited until the end of the week to tell him that I was arranging for meals to be delivered to his apartment twice a day, for someone to stay to heat the meal and remind him to eat, for a nurse to come check on him daily, for weekly house calls from a doctor and a social worker. I stood back when I had finished, afraid he’d never speak to me again. Instead, he touched my cheek. “You’re like a fairy. I don’t know what I would have done without you.”
A Fifty-Year Silence: Love, War, and a Ruined House in France Page 20
