They must have parted on reasonably good terms because Dr. Angirany promised to send along Anna’s trunks as soon as she had a forwarding address. He must also have promised to forward letters to her; indeed, maybe it is thanks to him that my grandmother and grandfather stayed in touch. However amicable their parting, though, it would have taken superhuman maturity and remove not to feel betrayed and abandoned by her patron for casting her out into chaos.
The journey, once we hit the main roads in the valley, is dimly remembered. We passed slowly through crowds of Belgian and Northern refugees with many children and old people. Some walking on foot, others in all sorts of cars, carts drawn by asses, horses, mules, and everyone carrying most prominently the gas mask canisters which had been distributed to the population at the outbreak of war. Overhead the constant noise of the German airplanes.
Where and how we spent the night I can’t remember but do clearly the blackout. Everywhere in trains and roads, streets, only blue light bulbs, even in flashlights, were allowed. On the second day, toward dusk we arrived in Amélie-les-Bains. Streets were ultra crowded, everyone appeared frenzied. We spent the night in the small apartment of [Madame Rollo’s] friends. No lodging was available anywhere. Our hosts were gloomily agitated. Food had become scarce and they had no news of their families. We had to register right away for ration cards. After a day or two I was assigned another residence north of Perpignan because I was Romanian. I was put on a Bus for Perpignan, where I had to change for another bus to Caudiès-de-Fenouillèdes. I remember walking around under a blue sky in unbearable heat dressed in a woolen blue coat (saving thus a garment by wearing it) and often crying in self-pity, while waiting for the right bus. I had very little money, I felt all alone in the world of the South, being a Northerner and mountain-dweller. I was too tired, also hungry and dehydrated to think of the frightening unknown ahead.
I always had idolized Grandma, but in Avignon, I began to learn all the reasons there were to worship her, beyond her charm and beauty and intelligence and witchiness. Now I saw the moment in her life when, alone in a place she’d never been, with little money and no resources, she’d rolled up her sleeves and become heroic.
At this point, Madame Rollo lived with [her mother and stepfather] while trying to get visas through Spain and Portugal for her way to Alexandria Egypt and her husband. Being certain of the Germans’ occupation of all of France, [Madame Rollo’s parents] disappeared into the surrounding mountains to commit suicide, so as not to be in her way. She [came to Caudiès and] appealed to me to help find them.
By this time, I had learned enough about the war not to be shocked by this fact; indeed, my grandfather had translated an entire book about suicides related to the political situation in Austria and Germany in the late thirties and early forties. My grandmother, with her usual resourcefulness, found the nearest army unit.
I approached the Commandant of the Senegalese troops, who were, at the time, stationed in the region awaiting their return to Africa.…[They] willingly sent several groups into the hills in all directions to search for the old couple. One group found them and brought them into the village. The woman was dead, the man in a coma but still breathing. A burial ground and hospital were needed, only to be found farther [away] in Perpignan. The daughter …[took] it for granted that I’d accompany her, which I did.
My grandmother’s matter-of-fact tone, I thought, very nearly hid the astonishing bravery of this act. “The transport of dead people by unauthorized persons,” she noted dispassionately, “was punishable by law, as I well knew.” Had they been discovered, Anna and Madame Rollo would have been arrested and deported immediately. Nothing daunted, Anna had the Senegalese soldiers carry Madame Rollo’s parents to the waiting car.
The stepfather, whose breathing was obvious, sat next to her. I was in back, with the pale, dead body propped up, and made efforts the whole way to keep it thus.… All along the route …[were] numerous checkpoints … where gendarmes asked questions, and looked into the car and trunk. I did all the explanations: I was a physician and we were on our way to a hospital to help these obviously very sick and dying old people. Miracle! They let us pass each time.
When they arrived in Perpignan, Madame Rollo learned that her Egyptian visa had been granted and was faced with a dilemma she found unbearable: she could depart and abandon her parents, or stay by their sides and risk deportation herself. Because they were foreigners, my grandmother wrote,
The only hospital available to us was a very miserable one set up on the edge of town for the influx of Republican Spanish refugees during the Spanish Civil War and the debacle which followed Franco’s victory.… Upon arrival … the woman was declared dead and burial permit granted. The man, without regaining consciousness, died the next day.
My grandmother did not say whether Madame Rollo hesitated and had to be pushed to save her own skin, or whether she abandoned my grandmother and her parents without a backward glance. Nevertheless, “I stayed to see both her parents buried in the cemetery reserved for foreigners and Spanish refugees, in a bleak field not far from the hospital. I never saw or heard from the daughter again.” I considered searching for Madame Rollo, but did not know where to even begin; my grandmother could not remember the exact spelling of her surname, let alone her given name. But Grandma took the unsatisfying end to this story for granted—what was one more fate among all the ones she had resigned herself to never knowing?
I remembered a taxi ride from Alba during the summer I’d spent there: the driver, a local man, had asked what I was doing in the Ardèche. I gave him a brief explanation, and he inquired, “When did your grandparents go to America?”
“After the war.”
“Where were they during the war?”
“Here in France, in hiding. They fled to Switzerland in ’forty-two. My family’s Jewish.”
“My family hid Jews during the war.”
“Where?”
“Here.” He gestured outside the taxi. “In the barn, first, then in the attic. I used to bring them food. I remember a family from Lyon with a boy my age. They got out. They moved on, I mean. Don’t know what happened to them—always wondered. We never heard from them again.” We were silent. Anything could have happened to them, we both knew. “I think about them a lot. I like to imagine them in America.” He brightened. “Like you.”
“Well, it’s because of people like your family that people like my family survived.”
Chance encounters like his, or like my grandmother’s with Madame Rollo, were incidental, anecdotal, anonymous drops in the rainstorm of history. Among so many raindrops, what was the point of lingering over Armand and Anna? Maybe a half century of silence was incidental, too—even to them, unremarkable in a life full of incompletion. But then I thought of the glance I’d exchanged with the taxi driver, both of us slightly awed at the way unfinished business is sometimes partially laid to rest, a long time later, by other people—two loose threads picked up and tied together, across a hole that nothing could ever fill.
CHAPTER ELEVEN