“I think we should walk, if you feel you’re up to it,” Grandpa suggested. “Are you in good shape?”
I hid a smile. “I should be asking you that question.”
“Why?”
“Well, you’re going to be ninety next summer.”
“Are you sure? What year is it?”
I told him, and he calculated. “Indeed I am. A regular Methuselah.”
At the store, I picked out an electric hot plate and a kettle with a safety shutoff.
“Is this for you?” Grandpa asked in the checkout line.
“In a manner of speaking.”
“I see.”
When we got home from the store, my grandfather went to sit down while I disconnected the gas and set up his new kitchen appliances. A piece of paper had fallen behind the gas tank, and I reached back to retrieve it, hoping it wasn’t anything important. It was the stub of an electricity bill. Grandpa had noted the date he’d paid it, a year before. Beside the date he had scribbled, “C’est comme si un clapet se fermait sur ma mémoire.” (It’s as if a valve were closing over my memory.)
“What’s all this?” Grandpa stood in the kitchen doorway and pointed at the hot plate and the kettle.
I slipped the paper in my pocket and smiled at him. “New kitchen appliances.”
“What was wrong with the old ones?”
I hesitated, not wanting to make him feel I was infantilizing him. “You know, gas is dangerous in apartment buildings. I think it might be against the rules.”
He ran his hand over the sleek white kettle. “I don’t know how to use this.”
“It’s very simple.” I showed him the button you pushed to get the water to boil and explained about the automatic shutoff.
“I see you’re intent on ushering me into the modern age,” he observed. “Well, let me make some tea and see how I like it.”
I set the table while he measured tea into the teapot. Beside the box where he usually kept tea biscuits I found another scrap of paper. On it, he had written, “Ma mémoire = ma passoire.” (My memory = my sieve.)
I decided to show him this piece of paper. He smiled when he saw it. “I can’t remember who said that. Ironic, isn’t it?”
I nodded, moved by the gentleness this new weakness seemed to engender in my grandfather. Again, I felt a tug of urgency: I had to gather his memories before they disappeared. “Do you remember St. Paul de Fenouillet?”
He nodded. To my surprise, he looked pleased to be talking about the past, as if he were happy to find himself on terrain that didn’t involve knowing what was in the refrigerator or operating fancy kettles.
“Do you remember raising rabbits?”
“How do you know all these things, Miranda?”
“I think they’re important,” I stuttered, not wanting to ruin the moment by mentioning my grandmother but knowing I would have to sooner or later. “You’re my grandfather, after all. It’s—it’s our history.”
“Hardly fascinating,” he protested, but he was still smiling.
“Do you remember the little wild rabbit that lived inside the house with you and—and my grandmother? She says the villagers thought she was a witch because it followed her around all the time.”
The smile snapped off Grandpa’s face, and he looked just like old times. I braced myself. “I’ll say it followed her around,” he sneered. “Do you know how it died?”
“It was crushed to death, wasn’t it?”
“Excellent use of the passive voice. Excellent.”
“What do you mean?”
“She stepped on it. Didn’t see it had hopped up behind her.” There was a nasty, metallic clang to his words, as if he were slamming them on the table one by one.
I was horrified.
“She was inconsolable,” he conceded, sounding just barely apologetic for his meanness.
I stared at him, speculating about how my grandmother might first have perceived the harshness I’d always known in him, whether it had insinuated itself into their relationship as water infiltrates a stone wall or shot out like a lance when the pressure of the war began to build. I turned my gaze away before he noticed and pulled myself together. I had more questions to ask; I might as well keep going now that I’d started.
“I had found this summer a wonderful supply of raffia in the most beautiful and varied colors,” my grandmother had written. “I made myself a pair of colorful sandals by crocheting tightly the fiber and sewing them together using double layer for the sole and lining the inside with cardboard. These sandals were much admired, light, cool, summery. I was asked if I could do others.”
With her usual resourcefulness, my grandmother talked the village cobbler into lending her his forms, and she threw herself into shoe production with the same energy she had once spent on patient care and cutting-edge diagnostic techniques.
I was a one-person factory, at times Armand helping, and though I remember at the height of production working from very early morning to late at night, I could not produce much, as I also took pride to do it well. Those multicolored sandals were really very pretty.
In the summer of 1942, as “Free” France grew less and less free and my grandmother searched for a way out, everything, even a few strands of raffia, began to look like a lifeline. “I was told that an American Jewish Agency [in Marseille] tried to get out Jews and also supported those stranded.… They could do nothing for me, and they could not give support either anymore.” She couldn’t remember if she’d sent them a sample pair of sandals or simply asked for advice, but someone in Marseille had found a retail outlet for her sandals. For a time, she wrote, “I could have had a real factory with many workers to fill the orders I got subsequently.” But not for long: the raffia ran out, and there was no more to be found anywhere. Since there was, to my knowledge, no organization called the American Jewish Agency operating in Marseille in 1942, I surmised that she had written to the American Relief Center, run by Varian Fry, whose memoirs I was reading at the time.
“Have you—did you ever hear of Varian Fry?” I asked my grandfather.
“Of course I have.”
“Did you ever try to contact his agency?”