That night I made dinner for the two of us, and in the silence as we ate, I almost could believe that everything was normal, that my grandfather was still an elaborately defended fortress of grudges, rules, and resentments. But then he would look up, and I would see the shy, unassuming smile of a little boy, reminding me that his intimidating presence and inflexible will were all but gone. When he smiled, he left off eating, the fork and knife forgotten in his hands. “Eat your dinner before it gets cold,” I urged gently, and he obeyed. After dinner I washed the dishes, and he dried them. I made us an infusion of verbena, and as I poured the hot water from the kettle, I thought of the way verbena tea was once special and absolute, like everything else in his life, and how its aesthetic perfection had once seemed like a reprieve from the eggshells I tiptoed over all day. He served it in a pottery pitcher he reserved for herbal infusions. Its matching cups were precisely the right width and thickness, so that the infusion cooled quickly enough but not too quickly.
“Where are your verbena cups?” I asked.
“I’m sorry?”
“The green and yellow bowls we used to have our verbena tea in.”
“Oh, yes. Thank you for reminding me.” He stood to look for them, then sat down. “I’m afraid I don’t know what I did with them.”
“It’s all right.” I poured the tea into his ordinary tea bowls, and when we had finished drinking it, we wished each other good night. My grandfather went to brush his teeth, and I shut the door to the sitting room and sat down on my bed, the little daybed full of memories that were only mine now. I had thought after Abah’s death that I never would cry again, but of course we all have room in our hearts for infinite measures of love and loss. I put my face in my hands and wept. When I saw my grandfather’s light go out, I called Julien and told him everything. “I’m going to have to find him a nursing home.” I felt far away, frightened, homeless.
“It’s going to be all right,” Julien reassured me, just as he had when my father had gotten sick. “We’ll do it together. It will be okay.”
As it turned out, my grandfather got along quite well with the system of nurses, social workers, and health aides I’d set up, at least until Julien and I were settled in Paris. My job in the translation firm started before Julien had wrapped up his commitments in Alba, so for the first eight months I lived in a nearly empty studio in Belleville. I had a futon bed, two camp chairs, a pot, a bowl, two coffee mugs, and a single set of silverware. My neighbors included my neurotic landlady who was terrified of the floor buffer machine the super used to clean the front hall, and a woman in the garden apartment below my balcony who drank whiskey outdoors on warm nights and intoned “Plus jamais, plus jamais” into the darkness in a gravelly, throaty voice. On weeknights, I’d walk through the city or write to my grandmother; on weekends, I took the train home to Julien, or he visited Paris.
Eventually, I tired of my solitary and wildly expensive apartment and rented a room in my friend Eve’s house in Fontenay-sous-Bois, just outside the city. Eve, aware that I was supposed to be writing a book, set up an office for me, but I just sat looking at my notes or rifling through my grandmother’s letters, without making any progress. Maybe I felt lost and displaced without a real home and without Julien; maybe I was sick of all the sadness and the space it had occupied in my life; maybe taking care of my grandfather left me too depleted to bring him to life on the page. Maybe all those things, but most of all, I had realized that I was now the keeper of whatever memories I’d gathered from my grandfather. The rest were disappearing or already gone. And what do you do when a silence vanishes into a different, vaster kind of oblivion? I’d spent a good part of my life searching for the words of the tragic, angry poem of Anna and Armand. And now it was evaporating, along with legions of other words I now recognized it was my job to remember and record. The task was too daunting. It was a long eight months.
It seemed to me I’d cut myself off and drifted away, from the United States, from my book, from my plans to become a historian, all for that unprecedented feeling of happiness that unfurled inside me when I was with Julien. And now I was alone in Paris, translating the minutes of shareholders’ annual meetings and copy for perfume advertisements, with none of the things I’d abandoned along the way to Julien—and no Julien, either.
At my new job, I exercised my genetic predisposition for translation and interpreting—was this, too, a gift to fall back on, to help us sourrwvive? There was my grandmother: When Erna and her roommate at four a.m. were woken up and me to interpret … And my grandfather, of course, had studied German literature in Strasbourg and then attended interpreting school in Geneva during the war. Translation is writing without the commitment; interpreting is an invisible and evanescent form of brilliance performed on someone else’s words. They are ghostly occupations, best suited to those who, for one reason or another, do not have a place they call home.
My office was in the Fifth Arrondissement, right across from the Île de la Cité. The bathroom, on the top floor, overlooked the Cathedral of Notre-Dame, and though it was cold and drafty up there, I loved to sit and stare at the view. I’d been inspired to study history on my first visit to the cathedral; I remembered touching the stone pillars in the nave and feeling a kind of electric ripple as I imagined the hands that had carved them. I knew my own hands were lingering in places those long-gone fingers had been. That, I thought, was history. Now I realized that the electric ripple that had so entranced me was not history but rather the gulf that separates the past from the present. I felt the same ripple, and the same gulf, when I touched the AUBETTE dish. History, I had learned, was easy enough to write. But not emptiness. What can you do but stare when confronted with an ever-widening gulf?
The worst part was watching the gulf swallow my grandparents. My grandmother’s letters grew shorter and shorter. She rarely complained, but she had no illusions about the future:
My health—as expected at my age—is deteriorating, not as fast as I wish, as lingering I find very painful and unsatisfactory.
That summer, during a heat wave in Geneva, the nurse who visited my grandfather every day called to tell me he had been admitted to the hospital. When I reached the attending physician, she explained that he’d gotten the flu and become dehydrated. When the emergency room doctors tried to insert an IV, he’d panicked and become aggressive, then suffered a minor heart attack. He was recovering nicely, she assured me, and he’d be able to speak to me the next day, when he was out of intensive care.
“I was with him last week,” I said. “He seemed fine. What happened?”
“Dehydration occurs very quickly in older patients, and it often aggravates senility.”
“Irreversibly?”
“I’m afraid so,” she admitted, and then added, “I take it he’s a Holocaust survivor.”
“How did you know?”
“I gathered from a few of the names he called me.”
“I’m sorry. That must be pretty hard to take when you’re caring for someone.”
“We get used to it. It’s pretty common, actually.”
“What, for your patients to accuse you of being a Nazi?”
She laughed. “In a geriatric ward? You’d be surprised. But I meant the memory loss. It’s pretty common for people with painful war trauma to lose their memory. That, and marriages gone bad.”
The next day, when I called my grandfather’s room, he sounded relieved and incredulous. “Thank goodness you reached me. They were keeping me in some sort of prison.”
“You’re in the hospital.” I tried to sound soothing and reassuring. The attending nurse had told me he’d barricaded himself in his room all night, pushing all the furniture against the door and screaming bloody murder when they tried to enter.
“Yes, they moved me. They let me out. I’m still under arrest, but now I’m in some sort of hotel.”
Your heart really does ache for people, I thought. The expression is true. I could hear all the old fears chat
tering around inside him. “It’s not a hotel,” I explained. “And you’re not under arrest. I promise. They’re taking care of you. It’s a care facility—a kind of hospital.”
“No, no, it’s a hotel.”
“It’s a place called the Hôpital de Loëx, in Bernex.”
“No, no, Bernex is hundreds of kilometers away.”
“No, Bernex is near Geneva, and you’re in Bernex.”
“I have no way of verifying that.”
“Grandpa, you’re all right.” I was at a loss for what to tell him. “You’re going to be all right. I promise.”
“I would have called before, but I don’t have any money. Not a cent.”
“You do, Grandpa. It’s fine. Everything’s fine. Your money is all in the bank, and you can get at it.”
“They took everything from me when I came here.” His outrage was palpable. “They stripped me and searched me. Even my coin purse—my billfold, my knife, my watch, my pen—I can’t even find my glasses.”
I’d been trying to cure myself of the habit of linking everything to my grandparents’ past, but in this moment, the connection was unavoidable. I could see, in my mind’s eye, the page from my grandfather’s police deposition:
Mr. Jacoubovitch presented himself voluntarily at the Zurich Central Police Station as a political refugee today. He declared that he had traveled here from France, and [believed he had] crossed the Swiss border on the night of December 10–11, 1942, near Champéry/Wallis.
1 Billfold with misc. papers.
1 Pair spectacles with case.
1 Knife.
1 Coin purse.
1 Watch.
1 Fountain pen.
1 Mechanical pencil.
“He has to go to a nursing home,” the attending physician declared the following week. “I can’t release him in his own charge. I’ll put in for a transfer to a long-stay geriatric unit until you find a place.”
“It’s good you’re there to take care of him,” Grandma wrote again, when I told her of the latest development in Grandpa’s life. “He’d be lost without you.” For the first time, it occurred to me that her interest in his welfare was rather extraordinary after all those years of bad blood.
I cannot let their story go, I thought, as I began looking for a nursing home. I cannot let them disappear like this. I have to figure out what happened.
By then Julien had begun his new job restoring historical monuments in Versailles, and we finally had moved into an apartment together, in the Fifteenth Arrondissement in Paris. He left for work at 6:30 a.m., so I spent the mornings before I departed for the office paging through the refugee files, buoyed by the wild hope that I had missed something, that my grandparents might have been interned in the same camp, or at least the same town, so that I could explain their reunion by a stunning coincidence. I decided to plot a map of all the places that appeared on their entry and exit passes, and in this way I traced them through camps and villages across Switzerland—Wald, Arisdorf, Olsberg, Wesen, Montana, Bienenberg, Finhaut, Territet. My hope deflated—carefully rereading their files merely confirmed that they had never been interned in the same place—then rebounded when I noticed that Arisdorf and Bienenberg were neighboring villages, less than five miles apart.
With a new sense of urgency, I wrote to my grandmother about the two moments I knew they’d spent near each other—their time in Arisdorf and Bienenberg and their residence at the mysterious “chez Berchtold.”
In her replies, I noticed my grandmother stumbling over her English—another sign of the widening gulf between now and then, between remembering in silence and the oblivion of forgetting.
“Only once was I able to meet Armand in Basel for lunch with the Koppelmans. The last letter before end of war received from my mother had the latters’ address in Switzerland.” What fear and tension were concealed in my grandmother’s dense, newly shaky handwriting, a lifetime of emotion concealed in those two words: “last letter.” Of course Grandma did not dwell on this final, frantic gesture from mother to child, a wave in the direction of a relative Mina hoped could help. Grandma had stayed with Mr. Koppelman and his wife in Basel during a weeklong course on refugee care in which she’d been enrolled by the Swiss refugee camp administration. “The K’s lived in a huge apartment on the outskirts of town in new apartment building complete with fancy beautifully uniformed maid and impressive valuable art.”
The book on Swiss refugee camps that included interviews with my grandfather describes the living conditions in the camp in Arisdorf, from which he would have traveled to lunch with my grandmother that day:
Lodged in barracks, the refugees slept in dormitories in groups of about forty, on straw mattresses stacked on bunk beds.… To wash in the morning, one had to go outside and use cold water, when it wasn’t frozen, in which case the refugees rubbed snow on their faces.
Grandpa’s great antipathy toward the very rich, which I always had ascribed to a mix of ideology and jealousy, suddenly seemed human and inevitable when I pictured his arrival at the Koppelmans’ luxurious apartment and his bewildered recollection that he, Anna, and Erna owed these prosperous people a “dette d’honneur,” three hundred Swiss francs loaned for train travel when the three had arrived in Switzerland.
Alone at my desk in our apartment in Paris, I listened to the city come awake and tried to will myself into the recesses of my grandmother’s memory, into the mind of a gaunt, black-haired young woman perched on the edge of a costly sofa, wearing someone’s cast-off clothing, drinking an apéritif, and waiting for her lover to arrive. I thought of Dora Bruder, in which Patrick Modiano describes his own attempt to write about the silent past:
I believe … at times, in a gift of clairvoyance in [writers.]… It is simply part of the job: the efforts of imagination necessary to this work, the need to fix one’s mind on points of detail—and this in an obsessive manner … all this tension, these cerebral gymnastics, might possibly provoke, over time, brief intuitions “concerning past or future events.”
Anna and Armand were starved—for food, for affection, for comfort, for beauty. And now they had a single afternoon to fill up on all those things. Fixing my mind on the details of that lunch, I felt a kind of hyperawareness in the two of them, a sensation of observing and being observed. Perhaps my grandparents worried their hunger and poverty would make them seem like savages; perhaps, to the contrary, they saw a kind of brutishness in the plush affluence of their hosts. Either way, they must have felt the Koppelmans’ eyes on them as they lifted their glasses to their mouths, sliced their meat, and wiped their fingers on the soft cloth of the napkins. And at the same time, Anna and Armand must have noted every word the other said, every glance across the table, every motion the other did or didn’t make. It was August 1943, and they had not seen each other for eight months.
My grandmother summed up the afternoon in a single sentence: “They liked your charming, well-read grandfather.” The strange economy of her hurried writing again both masked and highlighted the way she cohabited with tragedy: “K’s only sister and child were not saved early enough by him bringing them to Switzerland, and she died, having become mad from starvation and running naked through the Transnistrian concentration camp, where my mother’s brother and family also died.”
My grandmother’s entry and exit passes confirmed that she had been released from Bienenberg for a weeklong training program, but I couldn’t tell when or how my grandfather had obtained leave from his camp in Arisdorf. Thinking back to his story about going to church, I wondered whether he had hidden a part of what happened that Sunday.
There was no clue as to whether they spent even a moment alone together that day, whether Armand had time to murmur a few words to Anna that patched up or palliated their separation, everything they had endured or inflicted in their struggle to survive. What breathless shock must have bolted through the air when they first saw each other: I imagined my grandfather trying to gather his thoughts, turbulent as snowfla
kes, my grandmother flashing that search-lamp smile. An afternoon would not have been enough time for their idealized memories of each other to chafe against the reality of being together; it only would have been sufficient to rekindle a ghost of the spark that had flown across the table in the Café Aubette so many years before. There is a faint reason to believe he proposed to her then, in the hurried privacy of a hello or a goodbye, for my grandmother’s letter went on to say, “They approved of my marriage to Armand.” I imagined everything they had forgotten, given up, left behind, floating between them like a curl of smoke. Anna had spent the previous months cradling and examining other people’s babies, but to Armand, Anna’s hair and skin likely would have been his first tender contact with another body since they’d parted ways, the softest, most sweetly scented thing he had touched in months. I remembered my grandfather’s broken voice the one time I’d had the courage to ask why he’d married her. “What else could I do?” he had cried.
Seen in that light, it was only inevitable that he would have said those three words: “Anna, marry me.”
But if I had hoped for some romantic detail, a hint of the dizzy lurch they must have felt leaning toward each other, some shred of evidence that Armand had reached into his pocket and placed a small silver dish in Anna’s hand to pledge their troth, all I received was another tightly compressed line with which my grandmother occluded still more pathos. “[The Koppelmans] greeted my pregnancy with your mother as irresponsible on my part, which ended my contact with them.” I was appalled at this well-to-do Swiss couple weighing in on the probity of my grandparents’ life choices. “But your grandfather repaid our 300 S.F. debt when he worked for the French Ministry of Justice who hired him for Nuremberg,” Grandma added, and for once, my grandfather’s stupendous acts of subtle hostility seemed jubilantly, ferociously fitting. My grandmother moved on to my second question:
A Fifty-Year Silence: Love, War, and a Ruined House in France Page 21
