Grandma’s words became my creed—you did just have to talk to people. Soon after I moved in, I walked by the hotel where she and I had eaten lunch when we’d visited Alba in 2001 (and where she thought she’d slept back in 1948) to say hello to the owners. Of course they remembered my grandmother. They wanted to hear all about her and about what I was doing in the village, and when they learned I was trying to get together enough money to pay for doors and windows, they offered me a job cleaning rooms and waitressing at banquets. It wasn’t regular work, but it was a big help.
“Any honest thing you work hard at you should be proud of,” my grandmother replied when I wrote to tell her about my new job. “One of my proudest accomplishments was during the war, picking grapes. We picked grapes for fifty-six days straight, without stopping. They said they’d never seen anyone do that, not even the professional pickers.”
I was familiar with this part of Anna and Armand’s story. Indeed, it figured prominently in my fairy tale of their life together: an evil power had forced a prince and princess from their rightful stations in life, sent them into hiding, and required them to perform impossible tasks. They’d begun on the shores of the sea, moving through a sweaty haze of sun, dust, and cicada buzzing, the bright green vines wavering over the ochre-colored hills and out of sight. They worked with a ragged horde of people, surely dukes, princes, queens, and ladies like themselves, stripped of their names and their pasts, disguised as migrant workers and gypsies, whole thin families of them lined out between the vines on the big estates, the women clipping bunches of grapes and laying them in the narrow metal containers the men carried on their backs, the older children taking care of the younger ones at the edges of the vineyards.
My grandmother loved to tell of the magic that operated in those times, of how the rocky ground became soft as a feather bed when they lay down at the midday rest. Her favorite part was the abandoned castle in which they slept, to my mind a tacit acknowledgment of her hidden royalty. A pile of hay in a tenth-century stone tower with the most beautiful view, Grandma would recount, unbelievable, how beautiful it was. And there again, the magic operated: they were wrapped in a mantle of fatigue, so finely woven they barely noticed the pinprick itch of fleabites as they lay in the hay. At the end of the day, with the breeze coming off the sea, they looked out over the land from the dark of the stone tower and did not know when the end of the story would come or what would happen when it did.
“Hard work,” my grandmother wrote me now. “We were so hungry. We would creep back into the vineyards at the end of the day to pick the fallen grapes, or the green, hard ones still on the vines, and eat them. I weighed ninety pounds at the end of that summer.”
I put down the letter, feeling ashamed of myself. How could I have romanticized months of grueling manual labor, no fixed domicile, and near starvation?
They returned to Madame Flamand after the grape harvest of 1940 but didn’t stay long with her. By the end of the year, they had decided it was too dangerous to keep living there and moved to St. Paul de Fenouillet, a larger market town about ten kilometers to the east. Though the Vichy government was not yet arresting French Jews in any systematic manner, by early 1941 they had begun rounding up foreigners, both Jews and non-Jews, and sending them south to prison camps in the Pyrenees. My grandparents’ legal status, or rather their lack thereof, was more and more of a problem for them, particularly after the Vichy government passed a law in August 1940 forbidding anyone who was not a French national to practice medicine. My grandparents may also have moved to protect Madame Flamand, whose citizenship would have come up for review in 1940, since she was a Spanish refugee and had been naturalized after 1927, one of the cutoff dates the Vichy government used when assessing people’s nationality. Perhaps they had not wanted to draw any undue attention to her.
Anna and Armand moved during one of the rainiest seasons on record in that part of the world, a fact I knew from another of my grandfather’s secret doorways to the past, a small painting he kept hidden in his apartment, pressed inside a book. I had discovered the painting during one of the weekends I spent at his house while attending boarding school. As with all those little symbols, I never knew why he decided to show it to me. One day he pulled a volume from a high shelf and took from it a small, many-colored painting on a piece of thick watercolor paper. It looked like a mosaic, or a window of opaque colored glass, angular forms fitted together in the shape of a shield.
It was a gray day, and the whole of Geneva was filled with a dull, pearly light, which shone into the room where we stood and made the colors in the painting glow as we held it between us.
“Who painted it?” I ventured, finally, when Grandpa didn’t say anything.
“Otto Freundlich. Do you know who that is?”
I shook my head. He took out his dictionary of proper names, found the page, and handed it to me, his finger on the entry. I read the first sentence aloud. “ ‘Freundlich (Otto) Peintre et sculpteur allemand (Stolp, auj. Slupsk, Poméranie 1878—camp de concentration de Lublin-Majdanek, Pologne 1943).’ ” Freundlich (Otto) German painter and sculptor (b. Stolp, a.k.a. Slupsk Pomerania, 1878—d. Lublin-Maidanek concentration camp, Poland, 1943). I finished reading about the man whose painting my grandfather kept hidden in his library and handed the dictionary back to him. He put it away without a word. “Did you know him?”
My grandfather had set the painting on his desk to pull out the dictionary. Now he picked it up again; we stood and looked at it.
“I knew him during the war. I’m not sure how he managed to make it down south from Paris, but he did.”
“How did you meet him? Did you live in the same town?”
“There had been floods in the south, and they washed away a great many roads and small bridges around Caudiès and St. Paul. So after the harvests were over, I got a job with one of the work crews the government assigned to repair them.”
I asked what he’d done on the job.