“Didn’t they feed you?”
He shook his head. “The food was lousy. And young men are always hungry. It was fall, in the south. There were figs all around.” He finished his fig and held his hands in a circle the size of a large dinner plate. “The chasseurs à pied had big berets, like this, and I remember filling mine with figs to eat.”
“What else happened?”
“Then I lay down under a tree and had a nap.”
“I mean, what else did you do while you were in the army?”
He marched his fingers up and down the table. “That. And I learned to take apart a gun, and put it back together, and clean it.”
“That’s all?”
“More or less.”
“Wasn’t it the war?”
“Yes, but nothing had happened yet. And the Germans were up north, anyway.”
Emboldened, perhaps, by his lenience with regard to the dry figs, I pressed a little further. “Why did you enlist in the south if you lived in Strasbourg?”
“I bicycled down there.”
“You bicycled? Wasn’t that far?”
“I liked cycling,” my grandfather said, taking a sip of his tea. “And when they evacuated Strasbourg, when the war broke out …” He looked off out the window. “The trains and wagons were all crowded … I was able-bodied. It seemed only fair to leave the seats to the people who needed them. And I was curious to see what the city looked like when it was empty.” My grandmother had told me my grandfather had been fighting with his father when they parted ways. Had that been the real reason he hadn’t left with his family? That was a corner of the minefield in which I didn’t dare tread.
To my surprise, my grandfather kept talking. He saw his family off—mother, father, sister-in-law Rose, nephew Paul—on the second of September and waited to leave until the next day, or possibly the next. When the time came, he took his bicycle, attached the panniers, and stood beside his apartment building looking around the empty street. Bits of paper and empty cans rattled down the sidewalk; stray cats mewed; abandoned dogs wandered forlornly in the street. Before he left, he went back upstairs for one last look at his family’s home, now emptied of their most important possessions. Everything else was swathed in dust cloths. The shutters were closed, the stove was cold, and the kitchen was bare, except for the glass crock of pickles Armand’s father put up every year. They were still curing. On impulse, Armand reached up, took the crock off the shelf, and carried it down into the street. He couldn’t possibly take it with him, he realized, but he didn’t want to abandon it, either: he didn’t want to leave anything the German soldiers might enjoy. So he smashed it, lifting it as high over his head as he could and dashing it against the sidewalk. The glass tinkled, and the little pickles rolled everywhere. The ocean smell of brine seeped up into his nose as it sank into the pavement. He thought he heard footsteps, and quickly he straddled his bicycle. He pushed off, then stopped, listening. The sound of footsteps was louder now, closer, accompanied by a little creaking sound. Armand held his breath. An old man in a ragged suit and bedroom slippers emerged from behind a building, pushing a baby carriage. There were two neckties and a tin can on a string around his neck. A pack of sad-looking dogs followed after him, looking hopeful. Spooked, Armand pushed off and biked away as quickly as he could, headed south.
“Why south?” I asked again. I was hoping for a mention of my grandmother, for I knew he’d gone to see her.
“I wanted to join the navy,” Grandpa said. “I didn’t know how easily I got seasick,” he added wryly.
“Why the navy?”
“Because the Germans had a weak navy. Everyone was saying that the war would happen on land, not at sea.” He laughed, full of regret and self-deprecation. “Of course everyone had had the same idea as me, and … how does one say, j’ai tra?né les pieds—ah yes, I had dragged my feet to enlist, and the navy was full.” He described the recruiting officer, a large, jovial man who rocked up and down on his feet and smoothed his handsome naval officer’s jacket over his belly and called my grandfather “mon petit.” “Mon petit”—my grandfather imitated the man’s booming voice—“we aren’t even taking fishermen’s sons.” Then the officer wrote the name and address of a friend who was a recruiting officer on a little piece of paper that he tucked into the breast pocket of my grandfather’s jacket and sent him off to Sète, where he signed on with the Chasseurs alpins, an elite infantry in the French Army. In ordinary times, Armand would have learned mountaineering, cross-country skiing, and survival skills—possibly even how to build an igloo—but now the entire French Army was in a confused frenzy of disorganized preparation for a war that wasn’t happening as they’d thought it would, so they all just sat around and waited instead.
This was the opening I’d been anticipating. The trail of my grandparents’ love went cold in St. Hilaire du Touvet, but I knew my grandmother didn’t stay there for very long. In November 1937 she was hired as chief assistant to Dr. Joseph Angirany, the head of a private sanatorium halfway between Lyon and Geneva, in a TB station called Hauteville. I knew from my mother’s blue photo album that he had visited her there and from my grandmother herself that they had taken a vacation together before he enlisted. “Did you go to Hauteville?” I asked.
My grandfather looked startled, as if I’d made a rude and unpleasant noise in the quiet of the dining room. “Whatever do you mean?”
Anna (front row, second from the right) with the staff of the Hauteville sanatorium in 1939. Dr. Angirany is seated beside her, in the center.
“She—my grandmother—I thought—did you go to visit my grandmother in Hauteville?”
“Indeed I did,” Grandpa said haughtily. “Once for my birthday and once when the war started.” He sighed. “She gave me a travel blanket for my birthday, and she berated me when I lost it. Unbearable.” His face darkened, and for a moment I worried he would crush his teacup in his hand. He set it down, though, and snarled, “No one could stand her. Even her precious Dr. Angirany threw her out. Of course, he was an anti-Semite.”
“He was?”
“Everyone knew it.”
“You knew him?”
“Yes.” He leaned toward me. “Not the way she knew him, of course.” He raised his eyebrows. “They had a relationship that was distinctly hors professionnel.”
“What does that mean?”
“I believe you’re old enough to know what that means.”
He poured himself some more tea and glared at me, daring me to ask another question, but I had run out of courage.