“Was that a good thing?”
“Exactly! It was dangerous. Every night they would come and buy her drinks. You know they get very mean if you don’t drink with them. So, every night”—she made the shot glass motion again—“she would take some olive oil before she began to work. They wanted her to go to Moscow and sing for the big generals.”
“What happened?”
“She knew that if she went she would be dead before long. So she ran away.”
“What about your brothers?”
“Arnold was in Siberia; Werner went to a labor camp when he was fourteen, and then he walked through Turkey to Israel—you know, he could just survive …”
Her reminiscences drifted further back in time, to her own maternal grandmother. “She knew all about herbs, took care of the sick in her village—the smartest woman around, the best educated. The Orthodox priest would come around every Sunday afternoon, and they would pull the big religious books with the gold edges on the pages off the shelf, and they’d argue for hours in the salon. Such a lovely house,” Grandma continued dreamily. “But when I was a child all of that was gone. We sat on rough wooden benches.”
“Why?”
“During the first war the Russians came and burned everything. A tribe of mercenaries. Kalmuks. They took everything outside in a big pile and set it on fire. They loved the books best, the golden sparks the gilt pages made when they burned. Then they went to live in the barn.”
I blinked, clearing smoke and sparks from my eyes. “The barn?”
“Sure. They liked it out there. They helped with the animals—they were herders, not professional soldiers, you know. They made the most wonderful cheese.”
Grandma’s memory had overflowed like a springtime river escaping its banks, and her stories lapped over me. They say a flood makes the world look as it did in the beginning, before the dry land emerged. It seemed to me that her outpouring of memories had dissolved the wide gulf between us and the past, that beside her I could glimpse her grandmother, and her grandmother’s grandmother, and all the worlds each of them contained. I had understood how the war severed my grandmother from her everyday life, relegating it to the bygone and the lost, but now I saw it had also carried away her past—not only loved ones but also advice and instructions, proclivities and inside jokes, books and recipes, trinkets and keepsakes, all her rightful inheritance. For a split second, I saw an infinity of forgotten details dancing across history’s dizzying expanse. Folded into remembrance is the knowledge of all that cannot be recalled: I realized that when my grandparents passed away, I would carry within me not only the memory of them but the memory of their memories, on and on over the horizon of being, back to the tohubohu before the waters parted.
It was our last night in the H?tel Dauphiné Provence. The carpet didn’t seem so awful now. I closed the shutters and dimmed the lights, and the green neon sign outside the window flashed on and off through the slats, casting a murky pond-colored glow onto the floor of our room. I helped Grandma undress and slid her nightgown over her head, and we climbed into bed, side by side like two peas in a neon green pod.
I began to fall asleep. The room, and the carpet, and the green glow receded.
Then I heard Grandma whisper into the dark. “Camps … you know …”
I held my breath.
“… they wanted to put us in camps.”
The silence pressed in, and I felt my old, familiar panic and despair rearrange themselves into compassion and love for the woman who’d really lived those feelings. I reached under the blankets and took her hand. She held on to me lightly, her fingers soft and cool and familiar, her quiet, sober voice completely different from the exuberant certainty I knew so well. “They killed so many people … we were so frightened … we wouldn’t make it … I was so frightened.” I stroked the smooth skin on her hand, and her grip tightened, almost imperceptibly. “Some words you can’t even say.”
“I know,” I said, though I was only beginning to, only a little bit. We lay there in the dark together. I imagined the house in La Roche, somber and empty in its shadowy hamlet. Maybe they never meant it to be lived in, I thought. Maybe it’s just a place to hold their ghosts.
CHAPTER SEVEN
IT WOULD BE AN UNDERSTATEMENT TO SAY THE TRIP to France was a sobering experience. It was hard to feel the same enthusiasm about spending a summer in Alba after seeing my grandmother’s reaction to the place. If life had taught me from an early age that the world was sown with land mines of memory, I now realized that the house in La Roche might be the biggest land mine of them all.
But it was too late—our miniature and slightly dweeby artists’ collective, which in the end consisted of two friends and me, had already collected their grants and purchased their plane tickets. I can’t deny having chosen my subject of study—village life in the Middle Ages—a bit as a lovesick teenager chooses a bus route that might take her past the object of her affection, as if reading Georges Duby and the Rule of Saint Benedict could somehow bring me closer to La Roche. But when we got there, I realized once more that it wasn’t just a repository for ghosts and shadows—it was the place my heart had inexplicably and incontestably named as its home.
Cleaning the house took a day of hard labor, and then it was a pleasant, if primitive, place to live. We had no car, no Internet, and no telephone. To get into or out of the village, we had to walk almost two miles to a bus stop on the side of the highway.
I could wax rhapsodic about the passionflower vines growing over the stones, and the breeze blowing off the river, and the forbidding, mysterious view of the castle—all reasons I love Alba, but what I loved best, and still do, was that ineffable and odd sensation of comfort and security I derived from living somewhere that had existed for so long. That, and the isolation, made everything about La Roche seem to exist with more intensity, a kind of potent vitality I had only ever associated with my zestful grandma. Was that why she’d chosen to buy the place?