Back in Avignon, I looked up the distance. Five hundred kilometers he had bicycled to be with her. More than three hundred miles. I called my grandmother. “Did you expect you’d marry Grandpa, when he came to visit you in Hauteville?”
“What? Speak up. You know I can’t hear a thing over the phone.”
I raised my voice and repeated the question. To my surprise, she laughed. “Not really, no. Dr. Angirany was always trying to introduce me to other people. He didn’t like your grandfather. I was a little surprised when he said we should go on vacation together.”
“Did you share a hotel room?”
“Of course we did.” From across the ocean, I heard the little creaky birdlike sound she made when there was something unresolved on her mind. Were they thrilled to see each other? Distracted by thoughts of war? Did they feel a bit awkward at first? But that didn’t seem to be the unresolved question. “Patron,” she said. “That’s what we all called him. He threw me out when the Germans came—I always wondered why. Your grandfather said he was an anti-Semite.”
“Did he say anything to make you think that?”
“Angirany? No. But why else would he have thrown me out?”
Dr. Angirany had been my Grandma’s professional role model, her hero, and her champion. “In my later career,” she wrote, “I always compared my skill as a physician to his, and wondered whether I was as good as he was.” The two of them learned new diagnostic skills together, consulted with each other over difficult cases, and coauthored at least one paper. When the war broke out, every other doctor in the sanatorium was drafted, and Anna and Dr. Angirany ran the entire two-hundred-bed hospital by themselves.
These circumstances alone, I thought, would be enough to make my grandfather wild with jealousy; it was easy to imagine him trying to talk Anna into a bad opinion of her patron when she was sent away. But why had he sent her away? In my room, among the cold stones of Avignon, I tried to picture Anna and Angirany in the winter of 1939, exhausted and never warm enough, making the rounds of their frightened, displaced patients.
Despite our special allocations as a tubercular hospital everything became more difficult. The winter 1939–1940 was harsh and the “patron” was frequently ill from overwork and too little rest, so was I. My worst task was my mandatory presence at all funerals. We never had any before the war. Prognosis was quite precise and we summoned families of very sick patients and advised them to remove their family member to local facilities so they could be buried in family plots and local cemeteries. [Now], of course, evacuees were the sickest, [and] we had more work with less personnel and many, many losses. All this winter I attended the funerals, representing family and hospital … in freezing rain or snow on the windblown hill cemetery above the village … always a sad ordeal.… To this day I could perform a Catholic burial service and sometimes did so in my dreams.
A memory returned to me of my grandmother sitting on the back porch of my parents’ house one summer in Asheville and staring into the bottom of a dessert plate, across which was smeared a streak of bloodred raspberry juice. I asked her what she was thinking about, and she said, “I had a patient, a student. A Belgian, a relapse who escaped to France. He survived a firing squad because when the bodies fell, one of them fell on him and they left him for dead. A miracle.” With that word she pushed down hard on those dangerous memories and rushed on. “That winter Dr. Angirany—he was a former tubercular, like me, like most TB specialists—one day he looked at me and pulled me aside into an empty examining room and started unbuttoning his shirt.” She smiled. “I always told him it was my real specialization certificate—he’d been coughing all winter, and he wanted confirmation.”
I compared this rather incoherent version of the story to the written one I had before me. It was easy to see why my grandfather might have thought she and Angirany were having an affair—surely the idea of a man undressing in front of Anna, particularly someone she so admired, would have made him boil with rage.
The high point of my collaboration with [Angirany] was when one day, during the first war winter, he asked me to examine him. We were overworked and cared for many more patients than the sanatorium was built to carry because patients from around Paris had been evacuated to our region at the approach of the German troops. The patron started losing weight and coughed. I could hardly believe it when he asked me (and none of the venerable physicians of the other sanatoria) to examine him. I still remember how I was almost touched to tears, and told him that this gesture of his was my real specialization certificate.
Despite my grandmother’s professional closeness with Dr. Angirany, I could find no evidence of any personal friendship with him. Nor could I find any logical reason for him to send her away. He began urging her to go south when the war broke out, more and more frequently as it became clear France was headed for defeat. “A Jewish assistant didn’t look right” was how my grandmother explained it. “Not really knowing what went on with my fellow Jews, I had never planned to flee, considering my place was with the patients.”
Fleeing may never have been her intention, but the pressure of the war kept mounting: the Nazis surged through the Ardennes and began pushing toward Paris. One day in June 1940 Anna happened to pass by the house of an acquaintance, a German-Jewish woman named Madame Rollo, who had been renting a cottage in Hauteville. Anna had dined with Madame Rollo and her parents multiple times before the war had made her too busy for socializing.
I found her, ready, packed to leave for Amélie-les-Bains, where the Paris Government had removed itself, as well as many Embassies and Consulates. She had some extra gas to last for the long journey. She invited me to join her and I did after picking up a few things to take with me.
It looked like Dr. Angirany hadn’t thrown Anna out; she was the one who decided it was time to go. Moreover, in my grandmother’s Swiss refugee files, I gleaned an interesting fact: Joseph Angirany had my grandmother’s work permit renewed on the very day France capitulated to the Germans. I cannot help but wonder—cannot help but hope—that he pressured her to move south because he feared for her safety. He would have been of an age to remember all too clearly the carnage of the last world war. Perhaps my grandfather’s venomous jealousy was somewhat founded: perhaps Dr. Angirany truly cared for Anna and wished to protect her.