“Come on.” He pointed to a place where the big loops of barbed wire grew wider and higher and helped her push them aside until a gap appeared. When she’d made it through and stood up, he rearranged the fence behind her, and they walked away.
The man was a priest, and he escorted Erna to a safe house. There she learned the address of a convent in Lyon, where the sisters might help her escape to Switzerland. Erna could have gone straight to Lyon. But she didn’t. Instead, she traveled back to St. Paul de Fenouillet, back to her friends Anna and Armand, and saved them.
“A miracle.” How many times had I heard Grandma use that word? That you even exist is a miracle; a miracle that you’re here; a miracle we’re alive; a miracle that we survived. As a child, I’d thought miracles were good. But Jewish tradition teaches that miracles are ambiguous. After all, if the universe really was created in the image of the Divine Spirit, there should be no need for miracles. A miracle happens when we humans rip holes in the universe’s perfection, and the Divine Spirit bleeds through the holes. Thus a miracle cannot prevent or undo the damage humans inflict; it can only alleviate some of the suffering caused by that damage. The question that follows a miracle is the same as the question provoked by tragedy: Why me? In those days, the only answer I could summon was, To remember. And I would look around the bleak living room in La Roche and feel afraid, as if I had faded entirely out of the present and transmogrified into some kind of remembering hermit crab, holed up in a bunker for unbearable memories.
Each time I visited my grandfather, I found that the mess of papers and books had encroached on the apartment a little further, despite my regular efforts to tidy up. He did seem to be managing with his new hot plate and kettle. I noticed he had kept the instructions I’d pasted to them, as well as the notes I had left on the fridge and on the door to remind him to check his supplies and bring a list when he went shopping.
I’d try to find ways to test his memory, to gauge the extent of the loss and how far back in time it had seeped. “Did you buy Le Monde yesterday?”
“Why wouldn’t I have bought Le Monde yesterday?”
“Do you remember where that Indian restaurant you like is?”
“I haven’t been there since I gave up my car. But don’t you recall? The waiter was quite impertinent the last time we were there.” Like my grandmother, he seemed more and more tired. Often he retired right after dinner, before I could work up the courage to ask him any questions about the past. And even when he didn’t, I’d find myself at a loss for what to ask: the subjects about which I felt most curious sparked so much anger and chagrin in him that I didn’t usually have the heart to broach them. Once asking questions had felt dangerous to me, like provoking a spider or driving on the wrong side of the road. Now it felt dangerous for him, to set off so much emotion in someone who was becoming so frail. Once he was in bed, I’d sit with my memories in that high-up, quiet apartment. I’d call Julien or distract myself with a book. One night, after he’d bidden me goodnight and closed his bedroom door, I wandered into the kitchen. At the table, which had once been his favorite sitting spot, a pile of papers had engulfed the radio, the teapot, his crystal ashtray, his silver cup of pencils and pens. Idly, I began sorting them into piles. If he got mad the next morning, I reasoned, he’d forget it before lunchtime. Mostly, it was just old copies of Le Monde and newsletters from the various charitable organizations he supported, which I piled on the floor to be recycled. But not very far down I noticed a single photocopied sheet of paper, looking battered and worn, as if a storm had tossed it up from somewhere deeper than those newspapers. I pulled it out and saw a poem:
It is late last night the dog was speaking of you;
the snipe was speaking of you in her deep marsh.
It is you are the lonely bird through the woods;
and that you may be without a mate until you find me.
I shivered. It was that poem, his explanation for why he couldn’t come to my bat mitzvah, why he couldn’t bear the thought of facing my grandmother. What was it doing there? What had I stirred up inside him?
Slowly, almost without realizing it, I made a life for myself in La Roche. As the summer went on, friends visited me in the house and lent a hand: we stripped the blackberry cane out from among the tiles on the terrace, painted the shutters, weeded the garden. I saved my pennies and ordered glass for the windows and a door for the terrace. Julien and I went to parties and cookouts and on excursions together. He drove my friends back and forth to the bus stop and the train station. I met his friends, his mother, his father, his stepmother, his brothers. And we laughed a lot. One afternoon in particular, I remember sitting on the couch with him. The front door was open, the sunshine was pouring in, tinted green from the honeysuckle vine on the terrace, and we just sat in the soft end of the day and laughed and laughed. We laughed so long we forgot what started us laughing, and then we laughed some more. And I remember looking at him and thinking, This is what falling in love is like.
Through all of it, I wrote to my grandmother. It was the best habit I ever acquired. Grandma was a firm believer in the adage that actions speak louder than words, but since letters combine the two, she liked them better than almost anything. That year in France I learned she was right. Our letters to each other brought back the closeness we had shared when I was a small child, and though she is gone now, when I open her letters, she is almost there again.
Not that she answered any questions in the way I wanted. She still zipped off on a tangent from whatever subject I raised. She was far more interested in what I was making of my life on the other side of the ocean than she was in digging up the past. “Write about your life now,” she urged me. “Tell me your plans.” But what was interesting about the now? What were my stories worth compared to my grandmother’s memory of November 11, 1942, the day Nazi Germany invaded France’s Free Zone, where she and my grandfather were living?
Your question brought back to memory another “miracle” I never recorded, not even “en passant.” When I returned from Lyon and by “miracle” wasn’t apprehended in the junction waiting room (which later on saved three, Armand, Erna, and I), I arrived late in Perpignan, no more buses for St. Paul—the Nazi organization frighteningly efficient!!! Every major street already bearing signs in German to the “état-major,” the hotels, different military services. I was told that there was not a room to be had anywhere, all occupied by the Nazi Army. Besides, I was afraid to go to one; everything seemed dangerous.