In the dark, dusty house in La Roche, the green streetlight lit the room just enough to make me feel like a little lost creature shivering at the bottom of a murky sea. I reassured myself by imagining my grandmother in the hot June night, looking around at the temporary home she’d made for herself, the noise and movement in the café ebbing and flowing around her until she dropped off into uncertain sleep. And I pictured Grandma now, lying in her own soft bed in her house in Pearl River, and how proud she would be that I had come all this way, had come to reclaim the house she’d bought so long ago. I felt a little wriggle of belonging, however insecure, and clung to it fiercely.
Just then Grant woke up and pushed open the front room door to go to the bathroom. Seconds later he backed into the room again and shut the door with a bang. “There’s a crowd out there.”
“A crowd?”
“I mean not people, but a crowd. Of …”
“I know,” I replied, without thinking. “But they’re friendly.”
“You know? You can feel them, too?”
I rubbed my eyes and tried to consider this question rationally, then gave up, since it was clearly not a rational question. “Yes, I can. I mean, I know they’re there.”
“I can feel them looking at me. Looking me over.” He shuddered.
“They want us to be here.” I pulled Grant’s coat around the dissipating warmth at my middle. “They’re just checking you out.”
“I’m going to pee in a jar. I’m not going out there.”
“No, I’ll go with you.” I got up, clutching the coat around me, and we returned to the hall together. While I waited for Grant, I wondered what it would be like for that sensation to be surprising, to not constantly feel the past crowding around you.
The next morning, over hot coffee in the sunshine on the terrace, we could almost forget the house’s ugly, broken-down insides. Grant and I sat soaking up the light and warmth of the day and debated about what we should do next, given that we had no tools, no car, and no money.
At the time I was convinced it was possible for me to reach into the past and feel the contours of my grandmother’s experiences, but I now imagine the opposite was true. I see Grandma’s spirit reaching forward, across time and space, to help me make a home for myself. On that particular day in April, help came in the form of Youssef, a handyman I knew from the brief trip to Alba I’d made during the summer I’d spent conducting thesis research in Avignon. Youssef is a man who seems to subsist on nothing at all: no one knows where he is or when he will be there; he is rarely where you expect him to be; and he is always present when you aren’t aware you need him. Now that I have actually established a home for myself in Alba, I rarely see him. When I do, he barely stops for a hurried hello. But back then, when I had nothing and knew no one, Youssef appeared out of nowhere and helped. He brought tools to scrape the broken glass out of the window frames, plastic to cover them, and kindling for the fireplace. And most important of all, though I didn’t realize it at the time, Youssef invited us over the little footbridge that spanned the Escoutay River to the “Le Camping,” Alba’s campground, which had an outdoor café and restaurant on a big shady terrace. Things have changed now, but back then it was where people went to grab coffee or a sandwich during the day, or to have a drink after work or on the weekends. Youssef introduced us to everyone he knew, including Yohann, the owner, who offered to let me use the showers when he heard the house in La Roche didn’t have hot water.
The plastic on the windows made the house feel less exposed to the elements, but it was still too cold to inhabit. At the end of the week, Grant went back to his teaching job, and I returned to Avignon. Until his departure from France in June, he met me almost every weekend in Alba, usually with one or two friends in tow. When I had visitors from the States, I brought them along, as well. I usually woke up earlier than the others, and cooking breakfast, I’d feel a little like a lady in a mining camp, ladling out porridge and hot coffee to our grimy little crew. Within our limited means, we’d work on making the place more habitable, but also we’d just goof off, walking as far as we could along the dry rocks that littered the bed of the Escoutay River, dancing around the terrace in the late spring rain, playing improvised midnight baseball on the path behind La Roche. The nice thing about rural France, of course, is that you can eat like an empress, even if you are living in a glorified rock pile. We’d cook big dinners, drink wine, and listen to music on a little clock radio Grant had donated to the house, or head across the river to hang out at the campground.
When I tired of jug showers and sleeping in the cold (though I did acquire a sleeping bag after those first awful nights), I’d trek back to Avignon for a nice long bath and a night free of spiders and scorpions. As I began to get to know people in the village, I thought often of my grandmother settling into Caudiès and of the adamant advice she had always given me: “You just have to talk to people. It’s how you sourrwvive.”
At first, my grandmother spoke only with Madame Flamand, sitting with her in the cool, dim kitchen and helping her with the housework and meals: “To find out if I was a legitimate doctor Mme. F. steered every woman and child with complaints (never men) toward me. She was later on told I must be one, from the way I asked questions and examined them.” In this way, my grandmother made this strange village into something of a home, putting down tiny, tentative roots as she cared for her new neighbors. I wondered what it had felt like to write to her boss with her address so he could ship her possessions to her, whether the pleasure of unpacking her trunks and recovering her bicycle was overshadowed by the pain of losing the position she’d loved so much.