The U-shaped apartment occupied the entire floor of a building in a neighborhood just inside the rampart walls of the old city. I inhabited one leg of the U, with a bathroom and an office to myself. It was exactly what Virginia Woolf meant by a room of one’s own, a beautiful, quiet space in which to write—and just as important, in which to be myself unhindered by the outside world.
When David wasn’t off consulting with radio stations in former Soviet bloc countries, unearthing odd facts about dictators, collaborating on opera libretti, or collecting prizes in Italy, he would retreat to his half of the apartment and write. We gave each other a wide berth and avoided chitchat, but in the kitchen, our common territory, we developed an odd kind of intimacy. David wasn’t my professor, my peer, or my mentor, and he did not try to be any of those things. As a result, he became a little of all three. He gave me books on the era I was researching, listened to me musing about my grandparents’ past, and read drafts of my first book chapters. I observed the discipline and rigor he applied to his own work and tried to follow his example. I didn’t know anyone else in the city, but it didn’t matter to me. I was there to write. In many ways, I didn’t feel as if I was living in an actual place. France felt like a giant mnemonic device to me: if Fébus Fraenkel and the date of my grandparents’ first meeting could pop out from a random book on my grandfather’s shelf, I had to be constantly listening, constantly vigilant, on the lookout for even the tiniest hint.
In Avignon, the breadth of my ignorance dawned on me: I knew almost no facts, no chronology, no geography. I tried to sketch a timeline of my grandparents’ relationship and realized I didn’t even know what year they had been married. As if she’d foreseen this snag in my plans, my grandmother sent me a package the week I arrived with a collection of her notebooks and loose papers. “I thought you might find these helpful,” she wrote. The stories and essays, most of which she had written in creative writing classes at her local senior center, were arranged in no particular order, and she’d included multiple drafts and copies of the same pieces. If Grandma’s spoken words were a river, her writing resembled a dense jungle of information, only some of which had anything to do with the questions I was interested in answering. I read it all, hoping for a glimpse of my grandfather, or at least a glimpse of an empty space or silence where he might have fit.
My grandmother began medical school in Strasbourg in 1931, at the age of eighteen.
I loved it. There was a very active and intense cultural life.… During my time in Strasbourg I attended Wagner’s whole Nibelungen.… Every spring the English Shakespeare plays, concerts, theaters galore, to have my fill when, I initially dreamed, I’ll practice in my grandmother’s village or nearby.
Interwar France was a heady place to be young, though its freedom, creativity, and tolerance were tinged, even in my grandmother’s memory, with the darkness that was to come:
I did so well in pharmacology that the examining professor invited me to join his research lab. It never came to be as Hitler had already started to raise his head, and we saw Jewish students crossing the Rhine, seeking refuge. For a few days I hid a [male] Jewish medical student in my room at night. Females were allowed to visit, but even fathers or brothers weren’t allowed in the rooms.
Reading this, I recalled my grandfather hissing, “She was hiding a man in there.” I wondered if he was suffering from a seventy-year-old misunderstanding. Nevertheless, I began to comprehend his seething jealousy. Not only was he completely absent from her writing, he appeared to have had a lot of competition.
One paragraph meandered through an argument with a bacteriology instructor who had failed her for helping another student, a man named Rosenfeld, who passed the course thanks to Anna’s assistance, and ended with a proposal: “In our graduation year he asked me to marry him and settle in Montreal.” I couldn’t help wondering if she regretted declining Rosenfeld’s offer and the safety she could have had with him across the ocean in Canada, or any of the others she’d turned down, for that matter: the son of the Egyptian consul, for example, or an Indo-Chinese student she’d met at a Sunday afternoon tea.
I combed through her accounts of classes and suitors and social events, looking for an opportunity for my grandparents to have met during the year she wrote her thesis, but it seemed to me they barely would have had time for a cup of coffee. In her last year in medical school, Anna traveled to England to represent her lab director at an academic conference (where, she loved to tell me, everyone compared her to Princess Marie of Romania) and made her last journey home to do research for the dissertation her M.D. program required, the legendary train ride on which she’d told the traveling salesmen their fortunes. Upon her return to France, “A particularly vicious pneumonia with very high fever sent me to the hospital, where, I was told later, I spent the first week in a semi-coma, in isolation, with no visitors allowed.” Her friends, inquiring about her at the hospital reception desk, were given a prognosis so gloomy that they took up a collection for a funeral wreath, a fact my grandmother found endlessly amusing. “Only the presentation of my doctoral thesis was delayed,” she exulted. Possibly because I was feeling rather discouraged myself, I imagined my grandfather walking disconsolately home from the hospital and dropping a coin into the collection box for that flower arrangement. And if he (or I) had hoped that her convalescence would afford some time for them to spend together, further reading revealed that Anna had gone on a rest cure in the mountains once she was released from the hospital.
The lack of concrete evidence of my grandfather’s presence in her life only reinforced my belief that the best way to uncover my grandparents’ secret was to imagine my way into it. I identified with my grandmother so deeply, and I knew my grandfather so well, that I was sure I could figure out what had happened, if I only could set all the facts around me like one of those Kleenex box dioramas I’d made when I was a child.