“What about a military base?”
“It was the end of the war,” he asserted irritably. “Everything was in chaos.” He reached for his matches, lit his pipe, and inhaled quietly. A puff of fragrant smoke escaped into the room. “They discharged me with five hundred francs and a certificate saying I’d fulfilled my military service. They’d taken my papers at the beginning of the war—they said I would be a citizen when my military service was over.”
“Were you?”
“Of course not.” He drew on his pipe. “No, of course not. But they had taken my papers, and when I went to recover them, they were gone.”
“Gone?”
“Mislaid, no longer valid—I can’t remember exactly.” He made the same vague, uncomfortable motion with his shoulders. “All this is in the past.” He pushed his empty teacup away from him, put his pipe back in his mouth, and looked out the window at the mountains. The conversation was over.
As I washed up after tea, I pictured Armand trudging down a long road through the hot summer of 1940, with his feet sweltering inside his boots and socks, his tongue parched in his mouth, thinking of cool water. I imagined in him a dry, expansive longing for my grandmother that exceeded even his great thirst. I imagined him imagining her and feeling a certain tension pressing out from inside of him, a little ache, an always emptiness. One foot in front of the other down the hot dry road with a memory of her dark, soft hair between his fingers. In my mind’s eye, sometimes he would pick up speed, lashed along by his passion to have the whole of her. I liked the idea that she hadn’t written to him at all, liked to think my grandmother acted upon my grandfather as north spins a compass needle. But probably she was the one who was right, and he simply had her address because she’d sent it to him. Either way, my grandfather would have been hurrying through the middle of a plain hot day that did not yet know what part of history it would become. He was headed to Caudiès because Anna was there, and he was hurrying because he had nowhere else to go.
In my mind, Caudiès was a place the color of cornbread, where the high sun turned the stone buildings into black shadows of themselves. Inside Madame Flamand’s café it would have been dim as the inside of a rain barrel, and I imagined Armand ducking his head as he opened the door and walked in, blinking in the light, looking around at this new strange home.
In their first night together at Madame Flamand’s, they would have lain in wakeful silence, listening to each other’s breathing, acclimating to each other’s presence. Looking at the accordion of sky and weatherworn wood made by the shutter, they glimpsed the blacked-out heavens pierced by chinks of light, a multitude of stars clustered as thick as the nerves in their restless, sweaty bodies. In the soft heat, with the silky, dim moon lighting up their skin in little luminous stripes, they would have stared at each other in wonder.
I set the teacups in the drainboard and looked out the window, realizing as I did that shutter slats point down, to keep out the rain, and they wouldn’t have been able to see the sky at all. I shook my head, feeling defeated. What other mistakes had I fantasized into their story?
By the end of June, it was warm enough to move out of my room in Avignon and live in La Roche full-time, on my own. Grant had finished his teaching job and returned to the United States, and I didn’t have any more visitors scheduled for a while. David helped pack my belongings into his car and drove me there. He had donated a mirror, a potted petunia, a teapot, and some mugs to my new home, but when he saw the place, he exclaimed, “My God, I should have given you a cement mixer and a tool belt. Are you sure you’ll be all right?”
For a second I saw the place as he must, a dilapidated pile of stones in an anonymous village, and felt a shiver of trepidation. Then I thought of my grandmother and shook that vision off.
“You can always come back to Avignon if you need to,” he offered as he left. I thanked him, but I had no regrets about leaving Avignon, no doubt in my mind that La Roche was where I wanted to be.
Once David had departed, I sat for a long time on the terrace wall, watching the sun pass over the orangey lichen, green ivy, and shaggy grasses that covered the basalt crystals of La Roche. If I turned my head, I could see the castle peering down at me from atop Alba’s hill, half hidden by trees. The house was scrubbed as clean as it could be, and it was warm enough that having no glass in the windows was no longer a problem, as long as I pushed the furniture out of the way when it rained.
It was a strange responsibility to have taken on, camping out in this wide-open house at more or less constant risk of vandalism. No one ever disturbed the property while I was there, but whenever I left the place for more than a few days, the marauders would return, moving things, upending things, breaking things. The house wasn’t mine, but I didn’t want to abandon it to its fate. Whatever I had come to France to accomplish, I wanted to accomplish here. La Roche, for better or for worse, was my place. For just a second, I felt gigantically happy, sitting on the terrace wall and watching the wind sift through the leaves on the trees by the Escoutay. With no little awe, I remembered my vision, seven years before, upon seeing the house for the first time. This is my heart’s desire, I thought, and I have fulfilled it. It was an extraordinary feeling.
CHAPTER TWELVE
MY EXALTATION LASTED UNTIL THE SUN BEGAN to dip behind the hamlet. Gradually, the shadows edged the light and warmth off the terrace, and I put on my sweater again. Except for the wind, La Roche was utterly silent. If I shouted, no one would hear me. I thought of the broken windows, the rotting terrace door, and the leaking roof; I thought of the fact that the house wasn’t mine and might never be; I thought of the fact that, even if it were, and I did manage to fix any of those things, the place still wouldn’t be comfortable, or even really habitable. The electricity was faulty; there was no hot water in the bathroom; and the inside of the house was a warren of unfinished, dingy, impractical rooms. My happiness deserted me just as abruptly as it had come, and I felt daunted, even frustrated, by the idea that I had actually followed through on this strange desire. What had I been pursuing? What exactly was I expecting to find?