By letter, Grandma answered my questions in her usual sideways fashion. “I forgot in which medical year I met your grandfather but know where. In a very popular café for students not far from the university.” She mentioned in passing that he was taking German literature courses at the university, despite not having earned his baccalaureate—a war profiteer, I remembered her calling him, since he’d later managed to get a university degree through a refugee aid program in Switzerland without ever finishing high school. A joke to her; an insult to him. “When I became friends with Armand … I started research for my doctorate [and] he helped,” Grandma owned, “but not as much as Prof. Larousse.”
I pictured Armand and Anna sitting and staring at each other surreptitiously in the din of a big café. He would have been annoyed by her expansive, candid chattiness; she intrigued and exasperated by his reticence and his scrupulous attention to every word he chose. The more I thought about it, the less I believed it was, as my mother had said to me when I was thirteen, simply electric. Or rather, I suspected the electricity had been there only as an undercurrent.
They disliked each other on sight, I decided. It was the autumn of 1936, and Anna had bold eyes and a smile she directed at you like a search lamp; her black hair would have been pulled into a loose bun at the nape of her neck, just ready to unravel. It would have taken her some time to sit down, since she would have stopped to say hello to half a dozen people, giving everyone her lit-up smile, or creasing her forehead into a worried pucker, or laughing in a manner Armand would have mistrusted.
Armand would have been sitting with his friend Fraenkel, waiting for Fraenkel to finish his conversation so they could start their chess game; perhaps Fraenkel was talking politics, and Armand was not in the mood for sincere, high-minded discussions. He didn’t have much repartee; he would have sat quietly, smiling a little when someone turned toward him to include him in the talk. He would have had trouble not looking at her. Every time she spoke I bet he stole a glance around the table to see what the others thought of her, half-hoping someone would catch his eye to share a bit in his disdain.
Anna would have noticed Armand staring—she always noticed someone staring at her—and noted how he was making a show of ignoring the things she said. Anna liked a joke that was on her, so maybe she told the story about the time she got arrested in a cabaret for laughing too loudly. Then Armand would have murmured something snide to Fraenkel—“It seems her charm is so formidable it requires an officer of the law to be appreciated safely”—and Fraenkel would have introduced them.
Grandma, of course, revealed nothing of this sort. In her letter, she’d abandoned my grandfather almost immediately for her thesis adviser, Professor Larousse, concluding with an enigmatic memory: “Because he was ‘fiévreux’ I went evenings to his home and this became an intense period of learning in all sorts of ways for me.” Again, I couldn’t help sympathizing with my grandfather’s wild insecurity over my grandmother’s affections.
I had a copy of my grandmother’s thesis, so I knew she’d presented it in the spring of 1937 and left soon after for postgraduate training at the sanatorium of St. Hilaire du Touvet, near the Haute-Savoie region of France. If she’d still been conducting thesis research in the fall of 1936, the actual paper wouldn’t have been available to proofread until the end of the year at the earliest. The window in which they could have met seemed tiny—maybe six months.
I thought of all those men who’d wanted to marry her, and then of my difficult, diffident grandfather. Had she chosen Armand because he didn’t pursue her? Not that falling in love is really an active choice, I thought, and went searching for more facts to add to my diorama. Were you and Grandpa dating when you left Strasbourg for St. Hilaire? I wrote to Grandma.
While I waited for her answer, I returned to the scene of their meeting: in the lost Strasbourg of my imagination, the plaza near the university was always lit, always full of people spilling out of cafés, scraping seats up to tables balanced tipsily on the cobblestones, their arms flung over the backs of their chairs, arguing, speechifying, playing games, making eyes, saying grandiose things about international politics and the menace of war beyond France’s borders. I conjured Anna and Armand getting to know each other as they worked on that thesis, sitting side by side in the café, leaning toward each other as they went over Armand’s corrections, their eyes meeting perhaps a little more often than was absolutely necessary. Somewhere in that time the distance between their bodies became noticeable, bridgeable.
A sudden, devastating love for Anna—if it was indeed comparable to Swann’s love for Odette, then such devotion and desire must have swept over my grandfather. Swann had made Odette into a work of art in his mind; perhaps Armand had done the same with Anna. Perhaps what made Anna so fascinating to him was that she, like a great work of art, was possessed of a changing beauty. In the photographs in the album on my mother’s shelf, sometimes my grandmother was stunning, so beautiful she didn’t seem real, like a naiad or a dryad or a sylph—one of those unearthly creatures. And sometimes, to the contrary, she seemed somehow too earthy, disturbing, uncontrollable. It was easy to imagine visions of that beauty twisting around in Armand’s mind when things went bad, transforming Anna into the hellion enchantress she was to him now, surging through his life on a sea of hurly-burly and mischief.
My grandmother’s answer to my question seemed like no answer at all, and I sighed with frustration.
In 1937 … a famous “Prof” in whose lab I had volunteered procured for me an unpaid post, but permitting specialization in phthisiology at St. Hilaire du Touvet in the Alpine “massif de la Chartreuse,” down the main road from Grenoble. I spent my 24th birthday in Grenoble invited by the Dentist, only other Jew, a Sephardi from North Africa and colonial France.… We left on an early [funicular], visited old and new parts of the town, had lunch at the Bastille …[the] fanciest and most expensive restaurant in Grenoble … and I wanted to return when Samama [the dentist] said he had counted to see a show with me and spend the night in town.… No way! We had a few sharp words. I returned on my own.
I sighed a second time: if my grandfather flew into a rage every time my grandmother was mentioned, and my grandmother responded to questions about my grandfather by gliding off onto other subjects, how would I ever pin down the facts? Returning to the letter, I realized Grandma had at least given me a hint of an answer to my question: she and Armand must have been dating, but not seriously enough to preclude her being taken out for a fancy lunch with another man. They couldn’t have been terribly attached to each other, I surmised—at least not officially.
With her letter my grandmother had sent more papers. They turned up a single sentence:
My boyfriend, who later became my husband … was a longtime resident of Strasbourg, and so I attempted to find a residency in sanatoria in the region without success.
At that point I did what I usually do when I feel overcome with contradictory thoughts: I called my mother.
As it happened, she had just returned from a visit with my grandmother. “You’ll never guess what’s in Grandma’s living room!” she crowed.