My grandmother had jotted these memories on yellowed scrap paper, in an essay she said was inspired by “the reading of Robert Hughes’s Barcelona.” The clearer-than-usual explanations made me think she must have submitted it to a writing teacher who’d taken the time to edit and ask questions. And for once, I was amazed to see, she not only admitted she had written to my grandfather but even elaborated on how he’d come to visit her in Hauteville after the evacuation of Strasbourg and before reporting for the draft.
This being my grandmother’s essay, she segued directly into a story that would have repercussions for her and Armand even after they moved away from Caudiès, about the time she’d been summoned in the middle of the night to care for the local gendarme, who’d been injured in a motorcycle accident. “He was lying in the middle of the road, crying out loudly with pain. Because of the blackout and faint moon, the assembled crowd appeared in black shadows, as did the vehicles.” I pictured her feeling around in the dark for her stethoscope and listening to his elevated heart rate, placing both hands flat on either side of his chest. When he inhaled, one side of his chest would have fallen under her hand: bad fractures, possibly fatal, if she didn’t immobilize them. “It’s going to hurt,” she would have warned him, working fast, calling out to the crowd for extra clothing to roll up and wedge under him. With no straps or blankets handy, it is likely she had to turn him with his own jacket, placing the bulk of the extra clothing below the broken ribs, then pulling the sleeves of his jacket to keep him pinned still until the ambulance came. “I explained all this to the gendarme, whose face I never saw, heard only his voice and got to know his chest under my examining hands.” Another man to spark my grandfather’s jealousy. “Much later I found out that my diagnosis was confirmed in the hospital and he was considered lucky that I had been able to be so precise and save him,” my grandmother concluded. “He and another gendarme in St. Paul (where I moved subsequently with Armand) kept us off deportation lists.”
The essay’s last two sentences, the first irritatingly loopy and long, the second concise and subtly self-critical, made me miss her terribly:
Myself come from landed Jews—my parents being the first generation in town; on both sides my grandparents were village people keeping a general store in their respective hamlets, but their main interests were in the fields and cattle they owned—I had often participated in field activities and had listened to lengthy interchanges about crops, barnyard residents (hens, ducks, geese, turkeys), how to save their offspring when in trouble and such. Thus I never held back with advice to villagers about such matters.
Homesick for a bit of that unsolicited advice, which had reassured me in childhood and aggravated me as a teenager, I picked up the phone and called her. “I just wanted to hear your voice,” I shouted, when she answered.
“Well, here I am, still alive.”
“I should hope so!”
“Well, at my age, you never know. It’s interesting, in a way, to watch your body shut down,” she observed cheerfully.
I did not feel like shouting about her body shutting down, and I was sure she didn’t either. “I have lots to tell you,” I hollered. “About Alba. I’ll write you a letter.”
“VAT? Write it in a letter, Mirandali. You know I can’t hear you.”
“That’s what I said, I’m going to write.”
“Very good.”
“I just called to say I love you, and I miss you,” I went on, but she had already hung up the phone.
With each visit to Geneva, every few weeks, I cleaned out my grandfather’s refrigerator and worried about his decline. I taped index cards with my phone number on every available surface, so Grandpa would remember to call me if something happened, and every time I departed, he took them all down, giving us something to do and discuss before we settled in for tea on the next visit.
Grandpa seemed to be on a fig kick; this time, once again, he put out figs to have with our tea, and just as before, something in the sticky gypsy sweetness at the back of his mouth sparked a story. At first I thought it was the same tale, and I felt disappointed, both for the sake of my curiosity and the sake of his failing memory, but I kept quiet, just in case he added a new detail.
“We ate a lot of figs during the war. I remember walking south to”—he thought better of whatever he was about to say and altered the direction of his sentence—“walking south after I was discharged and picking figs to eat.” We chewed our own figs in silence, and he added, “They make you sleepy, you know. But you have to be careful, if you’re napping outside.”
“Careful of what?”
“Well, for example, you have to pick the right tree. You must never sleep under a walnut tree.”
“Why?”
“It gives you a headache.”
“Really?”
The look on his face hinted that high umbrage was not far-off. “Why would I tell you so if it weren’t true?”
Before, his tone of voice would have stopped me in my tracks. Now I just changed tack. “What did you do during the war?”
“Waited around, mostly, with the Chasseurs … the fighting was all in the north, you know. I was transferred to the Tirailleurs marocains when they found out I was Jewish. And then I was discharged.”
“Where did you go afterward?”
“To the Pyrénées-Orientales. I had a job there, picking grapes, and a place to stay.” He finished his fig, took a last sip of tea, and picked up the leather pouch that held his pipe.
“With Madame Flamand?”
My grandfather stiffened. “How do you know that name?”
Everything I knew about Madame Flamand I knew from my grandmother, but I wanted to delay Grandpa’s rage for as long as possible, so I prevaricated a little. “I—I heard you mention it once.”
Grandpa cupped his left hand around the bowl of his pipe, a pinch of tobacco between his right thumb and forefinger. “Of course I knew her. She was a fine woman, a Spanish anarchist. After the war I tried to go visit her, to thank her—I drove down; I wanted to give her some flowers. But she was dead.” All was quiet. I worried that he would begin to weep, and we would have to sit in our painful remembering silence, but he went on, in a detached, absent voice: “Her daughter was there. But she didn’t seem particularly interested in all of that.”
“Did you live with her?”
“With whom?”
“With Madame Flamand?”
“Yes, of course I did.” He looked at me as if I were mildly touched, as if to say, Where else would I have lived? “She had a sort of an inn, I think, we rented.” That rare and fugitive we! I waited with bated breath, but Grandpa caught himself. “One could rent a room,” he amended. “I worked in the grape harvest.” He went back to packing his pipe and made a small uncomfortable motion with his shoulders.
I thought I’d take a little risk. “That’s why they didn’t send you back to Morocco, right? Because she sent you an exemption saying you were needed for the harvest.”
“Who sent me an exemption?”
“Madame Flamand—and my grandmother.”
“How could she have sent me anything? I had no address.”