My grandmother awoke the next morning feeling much better and agreed to let me send breakfast up to her in bed. After some strong coffee, we both felt reinvigorated, and I resumed trying to take care of her.
“I’m going to the pharmacy,” I announced. “I’m getting you a new bandage and some cream for the swelling.”
“No!” Grandma exclaimed. She sounded as if I had offered to stab her in the leg.
“You know the bandage you have isn’t big enough for you.”
She shook her head. “It’s fine. It’s a good wool bandage. I’ve had it since the camps. They don’t make them like this anymore.”
She undid the bandage awkwardly and held out her wrist. It was shiny and puffy, the normally wrinkled sags pushed out by the pressure under the skin. “I’m going to the pharmacy,” I said again, slowly and clearly, “and I’m getting you the cream and a better bandage.”
“I’m going with you. It’s dangerous.”
“Grandma, Montélimar is tiny. It’s safe. Don’t worry.”
“Listen,” she said fiercely, as she rewound the bandage. “I read about it in a magazine. There are North Africans here. It’s very dangerous. They could try to kill you.”
This announcement silenced me completely. It startled, even frightened, me. It was akin to her telling me that Montélimar was full of Martians, or anthrax, or Elvis impersonators. She’d been all over the world. She’d been to Russia with one of the first groups of American doctors ever to see the inside of a Russian mental hospital, back when Russia was Communist and its mental hospitals were sinister, scary places. She’d been to Japan. She’d been to Mexico. Come to think of it, she’d been to North Africa and enjoyed herself immensely. Her sudden fear of North African murderers was completely out of character.
“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 Ma?tre 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.”
Ma?tre 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.”
Ma?tre 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.”
Ma?tre 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.”
Ma?tre 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.”