I interrupted. “No one seems to remember whether it was French or American.”
“Well,” Ma?tre Frizet reasoned, “by French law, if there’s no prenuptial agreement, everything is automatically divided evenly in the case of a divorce. So I think that really, especially if it wasn’t mentioned in the divorce, you own half of the property.”
My grandmother had already been told this by several other lawyers. She nodded emphatically. “And he’s trying to sell it!”
“Couldn’t you speak to him about it?”
Silence. Now it was my grandmother’s turn to look nonplussed.
“I mean, to explain your side of things—”
I interrupted again. “They haven’t spoken to each other in about fifty years.”
Ma?tre Frizet sat back in her chair. “Oh.”
“He claims that it’s his property because he’s paid taxes on it and repaired it since the beginning,” I explained. “My grandmother only saw it the one time, when she bought it.”
“He rents it out, I hear,” my grandmother added.
I could see the notaire writing “rent” on her pad of paper. She stared at it as if it might offer some clarity. “Do you need the money? I could contact his notaire, and we could probably make him give you half of the rent money, and you are certainly entitled to half the money from the sale.” She sounded relieved to have figured out a solution. “In fact, if you sell it, I could arrange for the money to be paid to you monthly, as a pension.”
Again, my grandmother looked nonplussed.
“No, no,” I clarified hastily. “My grandmother doesn’t need the money. It’s just that she—” I trailed off. I wasn’t sure what she wanted.
The conversation limped along for nearly an hour. By the end of it, I had a headache, but my grandmother looked more than satisfied. We shook hands all around. Grandma took Ma?tre Frizet’s card and promised to send her a sheaf of documents. It seemed to have done my grandmother a world of good to tell her story to a neutral party, and I suspected Ma?tre Frizet could see that, since I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what she would actually do with the documents. Back in the taxi, Grandma squeezed my arm triumphantly. “That was very successful.”
That night we ate dinner in the hotel’s yellow dining room. Grandma seemed jubilant after her visit with the notaire. “You know how to keep from getting drunk?” she asked when the wine arrived.
I shook my head.
“At least that’s what my sister—your great-aunt Alma—says: before you drink, you take a tablespoon or so of olive oil, like that.” She raised her injured hand, stiffly, and brought it to her mouth, throwing her head back as if she were drinking a shot of neat whiskey. “You know how she learned that? She used to be a nightclub singer.”
My eyebrows went up. Grandma nodded, pleased to have surprised me. I knew Alma as a tiny, tough old lady living outside Tel Aviv. It was hard to imagine my gin-rummy-playing, ex-elite-athlete (she’d beat national records in Romania and represented her country in the 1932 Maccabiah Games) great-aunt singing in nightclubs.
“You know my father had the biggest, fanciest restaurant in Czernowitz but no head for business. He had the best chefs, always, and people loved the big, round dining room with the red carpet, gold everywhere. But one year he heard about this new thing, an automat.”
“An automat?”
“You know, you put the dishes in one side, they put in a coin and open the door and have a meal, which they had in the big cities in Western Europe. So, what did he do?”
A rhetorical question.
“He took all his savings and went to Berlin and bought an automat! The first in the region.”
“Was it a success?”
“At first it was a sensation; everyone came to see it. But then there was the depression—big failure. All that money, and no one liked it anymore.”
“That’s terrible.”
“Well, if you think about it, when people went out to eat, they wanted a real restaurant, with waiters, and the chefs didn’t like it either! But he always kept the house running the same way, and he paid for everyone’s education. This, because he had the best wine in Romania. He even had a title, he was a purveyor to the Austro-Hungarian emperor. And it was because of this that he saved Alma’s life.”
“How?”
“The chief of police was a big drunk—always was. When the Nazis came, they were rounding people up into the trains. They got her.” Grandma took a sip of her wine. “So here she was on a cattle car, in the train station—the train was going to leave. So my father ran to the police chief and collared him. He said, ‘Listen, I’ve been giving you wine since you were this high.’ ” Grandma held her good hand to the height of the table, and I imagined a tiny drunkard. “ ‘Twelve years old! Not even tall enough to see over my counter.’ ”
She paused.
“What happened?”
“Eat your dinner.”
I picked up my fork but put nothing in my mouth.
“The police chief says, ‘So what?’ And my father shouts, ‘So? So now the best runner in the history of Romania is on that train, and you are not going to let her be sent away.’ They went down to the train station and went through all the cars and found her and pulled her off the train.”
“Really?” I glanced around the warm yellow dining room. I felt as if I had been swimming and were coming up for air, as if time were fluid and it could be any year, then or now.
As if she had read my thoughts, Grandma said, “Back then, the regulars would have had their own napkins that they kept in a cubby near the bar.” She took a bite of food, a sip of wine, and dove again. “The second time the Nazis came, Alma was still at home.”
“Why didn’t they arrest your parents?”
“They were too much a part of the community. Everyone loved them. My father gave something to everyone. My mother, too. And she wouldn’t leave them. They told her and told her to get out.”
“Where would she have gone?”
My grandmother gestured to somewhere far away. “The day they were supposed to come, the neighbors had warned my parents, and my mother woke Alma up at four in the morning and said, ‘It’s time to go.’ Alma wouldn’t. She’s very stubborn, you know her.”
“I certainly wouldn’t argue with her,” I agreed. Alma had once hurled a mantel clock out the window at a neighbor who suggested it was unladylike to participate in international athletic competitions.
Grandma laughed. “Well, just imagine our mother. She was even more stubborn. Finally she just threw Alma out onto the street, told her to run.”
I tried to imagine this.
“So she worked her way to Bucharest, as a barmaid, and singing in nightclubs, and dancing. The country was full of Russians. The Russian officers loved her!”