La Roche in the summer was blissful. The world seemed far-off and blurry beyond the tiny universe of the village, reminding me of the little habitats I used to construct as a child, not so long ago. It was as if I’d finally managed to enter one of them, and everything around me seemed magnified to a gritty, wonderful complex of simple things, an infinity of details to notice, examine, and enjoy—the taste of bread, the smell of grass, the color of sunshine. I remembered sitting in my grandfather’s car that Sunday I’d first seen the village, wondering what it would be like to take part in the homey beauty of Alba, and now here I was. There was even a gray tabby cat who came around for snuggles from time to time; I gave her milk and imagined myself a life there that was permanent enough to include a cat.
But I knew, deep down, that I didn’t really live there, and that made me sad. At times I felt as if I’d never been so at home, and at times I felt like a beggar at a window, dazzled by a thing that wasn’t mine. Already, I was plotting my return. I couldn’t help believing that if I came there for good, I would be freed from the weight of my history, that I could escape the past by living somewhere that embodied it.
My friends and I drank wine, cooked big dinners, and lazed around on the terrace, and that was grand, but intellectually, the summer was deeply frustrating. I traveled to hot dusty archives and found snippets of information about deeds and titles and marriages and fealties and charters, but they revealed little about the people who had felt hungry and angry and happy and tired within the thick rampart walls of Alba and La Roche. Medieval studies had revealed a world of historical scholarship that I loved as much as my grandparents’
house, and I dearly wished to link the two together in some sort of grand unified field theory of the past. I’d applied for the grant with this modest hope in mind, but as I scrubbed stone floors, listened for footsteps in the street, or squished my laundry around in a tub, I began to see the cracks in my plan. All the fantasizing I did about what life might have been like for the people who had once lived there hardly amounted to history or even explained why I felt such a deep connection to the village. Many were the days I abandoned the archives and retreated to the ruined part of the house, staring at the rubble of old newspapers, dusty lumber, and brambles pushing in through the windows, feeling completely baffled that life had propelled me to this improbable, run-down place. I knew my grandparents and their silence were at the root of it, but the more I pondered it, the more mysterious I found the connection between their outsize personalities and the house in La Roche. My grandparents’ story was like a fairy tale whose particulars had been forgotten, glamorous in its details and secrets. I liked to imagine their love as dizzy and spectacular, with an ache behind it I couldn’t identify. I felt like an archaeologist, or an undersea diver, certain that if I picked through the debris in the house I would find something terrible, or something wonderful, or maybe both, that would provide me with a key, or a hint at least, to the story of their love and separation. Or so I sensed, but the truth was far-off to me then. Little did I know how far. Nor did I realize how long it would take me once I began to dig.
PART II
Anna, circa 1934, found in an old wallet of Armand’s.
Armand in 1937, the year after he met Anna.
CHAPTER EIGHT
MY TRIP TO ALBA WITH MY GRANDMOTHER and the summer I spent there in 2001 left me feeling spooked and embarrassed about my strange, immature obsession, and for a time, I tried to convince myself that there was more to life than my grandparents’ story. But even as I resolved to follow my own path, Armand and Anna exerted an undeniable influence over my decisions. Switching out of medieval studies (away from the house) and into early modern history was, I told myself, a dispassionate choice. I was interested in the origins of political ideology and national identity, and if I studied those topics in France, it was simply a matter of geographical continuity, of linguistic convenience, of the unique historical moment that was the French Revolution. But I just as easily could have chosen England, or Italy, or Germany. France was and wasn’t my grandparents’ home: it was the country where they had met, studied, fallen in love, been hunted and hidden—the country they both regretted and refused to live in, where they’d bought and abandoned an ancient stone ruin. Circuitously but irresistibly, I kept returning to the place my grandmother had picked out for me.
Their influence was not immediately detectable in my thesis topic—Jacobinism in rural France—until you examined a map and noticed that the archives in which I chose to do my research the summer before senior year were in Avignon, which just happened to be an hour south of Alba. Even my accommodations in the Papal City were evidence of my grandmother’s persistent interference in my fate: when she heard I was headed to Avignon, she excitedly recalled that a friend of hers, the poet John Allman, had a close friend there named David Mairowitz, a respected American writer who taught at its university. I ignored this information, but without asking me, she wrote to John to get me an introduction to David. I’d intended to stay in a youth hostel, failing to notice that my research project coincided with the Avignon theater festival, when all lodging in the city is booked months in advance. Thanks to my grandmother, I had a doorstep on which to land when I arrived for the summer. David took pity on me, with my lopsided braids, thrift store tuxedo pants, and rumpled blouse, and let me stay in his guest room. I made it to Alba just once in 2002, for a weekend that I mostly spent trying to fix a broken window in the house, which only made me feel more passionate and protective of the place.
Devoted though I was to doctoral studies and Jacobins, my grandparents’ story seemed more urgent than my chosen field. The French Revolution was over and could wait; Anna and Armand’s adventures, on the other hand, felt burningly alive. The more I contemplated it, the more I felt I had no right to go on with my own life until I had learned what had happened in theirs. Such a love story demanded recording. I thought it wouldn’t take very long, that I could compact the process into a gap year between college and graduate school. Getting to the bottom of their mystery would be a bit like crafting a Penelope tapestry: I would write everything down, present it to my grandparents, and they would cry, “No, that’s not what really happened!” Then the process would begin again, with me running back and forth between them, weaving and unweaving a story that tended asymptotically toward the truth, all the while approaching the zero of their death, but never touching it.
I would go to La Roche because I believed the very act of living there would be a kind of listening, that it would help me see my way to the truth. But there were holes in my plan. Two, to be precise: Anna and Armand. There was no reason to think my grandmother would submit to becoming the protagonist of a tale of love, loss, sadness, and survival; my grandfather promised to be even less cooperative. Nevertheless, I once again asked their permission to live in the house.
Over the phone, my grandfather warned me, as he had before, to steer clear of the drunkards and thieves he was certain populated the village. “I shall draw you a map of the people you can trust, when you come to get the key,” he reassured me.