“What?”
“A little silver dish. It’s been hidden in plain sight all these years on the big brass tray she keeps tchotchkes on. Like maybe a coaster you’d put under a very small stemmed glass—or maybe a dish a waiter would bring your change in, I don’t know.”
I had spent hours of my childhood examining those tchotchkes—and asking my grandmother for the stories of their origins—but I had never noticed there was anything special about that tarnished little dish. “Oh yeah, there was a branch of white coral on it that Vladimir brought her from the Red Sea.”
“Yes, and there’s a word stamped inside it. Do you remember that?”
“No.”
“You’ll never believe what it says,” my mother repeated.
“Tell me!”
“ ‘Aubette.’ ”
“What’s that?”
“Grandma said it was from the café where she met your grandfather.”
“What? Really? Did she say anything else?”
“Not a thing. She said she can’t remember why she has it, and then she changed the subject. I couldn’t get her to say anything else about it.”
“Can you imagine? Can you imagine how far it traveled?”
“I guess it survived the war because it was so small. It’s just the size to slip in a pocket.”
“I bet Grandpa stole it,” I wagered.
“That’s true. He has that whole collection of teaspoons.” My grandfather had an elegant set of Georg Jensen stainless-steel flatware, but all his teaspoons had been snitched from various cafés, restaurants, hotels, and airlines.
“But then how would Grandma have gotten it? Wouldn’t she have had to steal it from him? Do you think she took it when she left him?”
“I don’t know,” my mother owned. “But it certainly says something that they held on to it all those years.”
To me, it said everything: whatever mystery persisted in the particulars, whatever details my grandparents had hidden, lost, forgotten, or obscured, that dish existed. One of them—or both of them—had made sure it survived. A tiny silver dish, carried all over Europe, across the ocean and back: its silence seemed far more eloquent than any love poem I had ever read.
“Do you remember a café called Aubette?” I asked my grandfather, the next time we sat down at his table for our ritual teatime. Silence flooded the room.
“How do you know that name?”
“My grandmother told me …” I lost my nerve. “She says you liked to spend time there, when you were students.” I held my breath.
“Liar,” Grandpa hissed.
“Liar?”
“That’s not where I went. I used to play with Fébus in a place that was much more modest, on the upper floor of one of the buildings that lined the square.”
“With Fébus—not my grandmother.”
“With Fébus, of course. Your grandmother was a lousy chess player.”
“So it’s possible you could have met her in the Aubette?”
“Of course it’s possible,” he sniffed. “Just the kind of pretentious, showy place she would have enjoyed.”
That night, after I had gone to bed, there was a knock on my door.
“Come in,” I called, and my grandfather pushed the door open. He stood at the foot of the bed, his lips pressed together in a thin white line. I waited.
“That woman,” he said. “You must know—that woman …” He trailed off with a strangled, desperate sound. “How could I? How could I have been so foolish?” He tightened his palm into a fist and gestured wildly. “That woman,” he repeated, spitting out the words. “She would love to see me undone. I won’t have it. Do you understand me? I won’t have it.”
CHAPTER TEN
ONE EVENING IN AVIGNON I WANDERED INTO the kitchen to make myself dinner and found David pulling a stockpot out of the cupboard. “I’m making soup,” he announced. “I picked up a chicken carcass from the butcher’s. Care to join me?”
“Sure,” I said. “Can I help?”
David handed me some carrots to peel. “I don’t mean to interfere, but don’t you want a little more company? People your own age?”
I shrugged. “Kind of. I guess. I don’t know. I just want to work, I think.”
David cocked his eyebrow. “I don’t know, when I was your age—you just seem awfully serious all the time. Aren’t you lonely?”
“I barely have a year to finish this,” I countered. “And I’ll be in Alba soon anyway. I don’t have much time to meet people.”
“True,” he agreed. “Here, can you chop the celery, too?” He opened the refrigerator. “I don’t know, Miranda, when you talk about your grandparents, who are, what, ninety now?”
I nodded. “More than ninety, actually.”
“Well, more than ninety, long divorced, separated by an entire ocean—what’s extraordinary about them is that they’re more emotionally involved with each other than most married couples who have been living together for that long.” He pulled out the chicken carcass and a bag of onions and set them on the counter. “There’s no room for ‘kind ofs’ with a legacy like that.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, here you are, going off to live by yourself in an old dilapidated house in the Ardèche, and—”
“I love that house,” I interrupted.
“I know you do, but is it enough? Is it strong enough?”
“What does that mean?”
He chopped some onions and added them to the stockpot. “You know I hate psychoanalysts with a passion, but I read somewhere that houses are symbols of the human psyche.” He turned to face me. “What are you going to do once you get to that house? What are you going to do once you figure out where all the feeling comes from? What are you going to do about you? Where’s your love story?”
I couldn’t muster a reply. Even though I had begun to realize I could choose my own way to live, every path I had found led me back to the past. I couldn’t conceive of a better use of my time than waiting for a hint to come booming out of the silent chambers of my grandparents’ memories.
The next time it was dried figs.
“Do you want me to soak them?” I offered, when Grandpa set out figs to eat with our tea.
My grandfather was as particular about his figs as he was about everything else: before eating them, he ran them under warm water and massaged them gently until they regained something of their original shape and consistency. I would never soak my own figs, but with my grandfather, one did not have a choice about such things; I ate them without question and found them good. But this time Grandpa said, “No need,” and I felt a twinge of nostalgia for his fussiness.
We each took a fig. Maybe the seeds between his teeth made a sound like boots crunching over pebbles in the South of France. “I think the first time I ate fresh figs was in the army,” he mused. “We were always hungry.”