The smuggler looked perplexed. “I said, it’s time to go.”
Erna shook her head. “It’s pouring outside. Our clothes aren’t dry, and I think I hurt my ankle on the hike. I’m not ready to move it. I’m staying put. I’ll walk down later.”
The smuggler stared at her.
Anna made up her mind and chimed in. “We’re too weak. I’m not moving either.”
I wonder what went through my grandfather’s head as he watched this exchange. “Armand reluctantly followed our lead,” Grandma recalled, “resisting the curses and threats of the smuggler, who finally left, leaving us three in the cabin.”
Their plans would have been set by then: they were to go to Erna’s cousin’s apartment in Lausanne, then split up. Armand would travel to Zurich, in the hope that his birthplace would be willing to take him back, while Anna and Erna would stay with Erna’s cousin Ria, whose uncle was the mayor of a nearby village. Theoretically, then, Armand could have departed with the smuggler and gone straight to Zurich. But perhaps he balked at the idea of a sudden change in plans and at the thought of the smuggler coming back—or not—for two solitary women. He couldn’t very well leave them now. Besides, how would he have paid the smuggler?
Alone in the cabin, “in heavenly peace … we had a good night, a peaceful, restful day,” with a kerosene lamp throwing eerie shadows on the walls, the sound of the slowing rain lulling them to sleep. The following afternoon, as they were preparing to depart, the door opened, and an unknown person stepped inside, looking as spooked as the three of them felt. “I thought the whole lot of them had been arrested,” he exclaimed. It was another smuggler, come to inspect the cabin after his colleague had been detained with the previous day’s group of refugees (who would subsequently have been deported), or perhaps to close up the shelter until the Swiss border police turned their suspicions elsewhere. Their separation from the group was another terrible miracle to take in stride as they helped this stranger hide the signs of life in the cabin, closed all the shutters, and started down the mountain. The air was chilly and damp, but at least it had stopped raining, which made trudging along the muddy paths and picking their way across icy, swollen mountain streams a little bit easier.
Before they got on the train, they had to pay the smuggler: “We had almost no money, and Erna left a silver tabatière to be recovered when we could pay cash for the smuggler’s services.” My grandmother never forgot the fear of discovery she felt upon reaching that first town. Someone had put her coat too close to the woodstove on their first night in the cabin and singed a large burn into the back. “It made me look like a refugee,” she deplored. “It was so noticeable.” She was careful to stand against walls and sit down whenever she could. In the train, she leaned back and sat still, praying she looked insouciant, natural. “We shared a … compartment with [a group of demobilized border guards], who, in Swiss dialect, told each other that we were Jewish refugees but they were off duty.… In Lausanne, Ria Berger, Erna’s cousin, was at the train station. Another few days of recuperation with food we hadn’t seen for ages in a fine apartment and loving concern. We were in Switzerland, no doubt, and another chapter of my life began.”
I stopped reading. “Another chapter of my life began.” Not our life. My life. My heart beating rapidly, I flipped through their refugee dossiers. I had always thought my grandparents separated more or less against their will upon their arrival in Switzerland. Now I wondered if they’d still been together. I picked up the phone. “Grandma,” I shouted when she answered, “I have an important question for you.”
“Speak up.”
“What happened with you and Grandpa when you crossed the border?”
“What?”
“When you crossed the border into Switzerland,” I repeated, “what did you do?”
“Ria had an uncle, Uncle Sprenger, who was the mayor of a small village. They spent summers at his house when Erna was a girl. And we couldn’t stay with Ria more than a day in Lausanne; it would have looked suspicious, her taking food for three people and using all that water and such. So we went to the uncle, and then he went with us, and we turned ourselves in to the police, and we spent a couple of nights in jail, but he pulled some strings so we weren’t sent back over the border and could be in the same camp together.”
“Who?”
“Ria’s uncle.”
“No, so who could be in the same camp together?”
“Erna and me, of course. It was very damp in that jail, but they had the BBC. I remember we got to listen to the BBC. The first time in the whole war.”
“What about Grandpa?”
“What do you mean?”
“Where was he?”
“He went to Zurich. He was born there.”
“That was it?”
“What?”
“You just left each other?”
“Mirandali, I can’t hear you. You know the phone makes me tired. Write it down. Write it in a letter.”
The next time I visited my grandfather, I took Julien to meet him. We drove to Geneva across the Rh?ne valley and past the Massif de la Chartreuse, where my grandmother had had her first residency, under and around the edges of the Alps. When we arrived at my grandfather’s apartment, we drank tea and chatted about literature and politics. “He’s a nice young man,” my grandfather pronounced, when Julien was out of earshot.
“I think so, too.”
I remembered my question. “Grandpa, what did you do when you got over the Swiss border? Where did you go?”
“Zurich. I thought I might get some kind of special treatment there because I was born there.”
“Did you?”
“No. They took all my possessions and threw me in jail.”
“In jail?”
He smiled. “It was all right. I was in there with a—how do you say it, a maquereau—”
“A pimp.”
“Yes, a pimp, wearing a fancy suit, who kept conducting his business very loudly from the window of the jail. And a florist. He was very kind. A pacifist—they threw him in jail every year because he wouldn’t perform his military service. We played chess together. And there were some German deserters, too, I remember. I steered clear of them.”
“Then what happened?”
“They sent me to a labor camp.”
“What was that like?”
Grandpa looked sad and dreamy. “It was on the floor of some sort of abandoned factory. Iron beds with straw mattresses. And I remember they would call us in the morning, and we had to assemble in the stairs and wash up outside. In the winter you had to break the ice in the washbasins.”
“Where was my grandmother? Do you know where my grandmother was? Did you write to her?”
“Of course not. How could I know where she was?”