“Sweetheart, pull yourself together,” he consoled me. “This is not 1942. You’re fine. We’ll see each other again.”
I could not help noticing the great difference in our reactions, and it occurred to me it might be worthwhile to make an effort not to live in the strange looking glass of memory. On the drive back from Atlanta, I tried to estimate how much of my life I’d spent, as Julien put it, thinking it was 1942, waking up bathed in the terror of my nightmares or clenched with panic, keeping my shoes by the door, comparing every moment I could to an analogous instance in my grandparents’ lives, as if by tracing my experiences over their own, I could make up for something that had been lost. I stopped for a coffee and drank it outside, seated on my car hood and looking around at the winter landscape. I pulled out the big refugee file, which I’d brought with me in the vain hope that I could guilt-trip the French consulate into giving me a visa, and flipped it open to one of the many pages I’d marked, a sheet of finicky administrative questions my grandfather had answered in handwriting I recognized as if it had been scrawled yesterday.
What is your native language? French (or Yiddish?)
Beyond the profession for which you were trained, what type of work could you learn the most easily? Multiple skills: translator, teacher, accountant, laborer, interpreter, assistant land surveyor, proofreader, etc., etc.
Why did you leave your country of origin and why are you unable to return to it? Because I am a Jew and I risk deportation.
Of course I realized it wasn’t 1942. Any self-respecting historian knows—intellectually, at least—to beware the all-too-human tendency to identify with her subjects. At the same time, although my encounter at the consulate could not actually teach me what my grandparents had felt as they filled out forms for hostile bureaucracies, it did make me think about being placed at the mercy of stacks of paper and bored civil servants, struggling against the hard, blind edges of the law. Even if my anger was a privilege of my station and my grandparents had not reacted similarly, the comparison pushed me to think about reduction, about what it was like to be pared down to a series of answers on a piece of paper. My grandparents had been categorized so many times, as Jews, as immigrants, as survivors. I thought of Anne, the daughter of friends of my grandmother, and her crusade to record and preserve survivors’ memories of the time before the war, before that generation had been reduced to remembering the Shoah for the benefit of history. I shuddered, thinking of the endless punishment it must be to live with both the personal and the cultural aftereffects of a trauma: while other people their age had been granted a quiet lifetime of ordinary memories that would evaporate peacefully into the hereafter when they expired, my grandparents were hounded not only by the memory of what they’d lived through in the war, not only by the loss of all that had been destroyed in those six years, but also by the exhausting injunction, “never forget.”
I got back into the car. Now I am certain that the poetry of my grandparents’ silence and the hidden time bomb of the house in La Roche were both the lure with which they drew me in to remember and record their stories and their last-ditch attempt to blast themselves out of that series of reductions. But back then I was too busy trying to see my way to the center of their story to notice what it might look like in its broader arc.
As I drove, I tried again to picture Anna and Armand during their last night together, in Erna’s cousin’s apartment. I strained to listen: Were they whispering plans to each other? I squinted my eyes against the highway to see if I couldn’t conjure up two young, tired bodies, thin and trembling with emotion, unable to fathom all they’d just survived. I wanted them to hold hands. I wanted Armand to get up, rummage through a bag, and then slip that silver dish with AUBETTE printed in the bottom to Anna, as a sign, a coded promise.
But perhaps the little silver dish meant something else entirely. Perhaps it was a memento, a brave acknowledgment that they were not right for each other and should part ways. And of course, given my grandfather’s penchant for cutting people off to avoid the complications of saying goodbye, maybe they weren’t even speaking when they left each other, and the AUBETTE dish lay forgotten at the bottom of a bag.
The next day I went back to my job at the New Age bookstore, telling total strangers what to expect from their lives and shelving books on delving into past incarnations—the irony of which was entirely lost on me at the time.
Soon afterward I drove to New York to pick up my grandmother and bring her down to her house in Asheville, which she visited more rarely now that she didn’t fly.
From Pearl River to the northern tip of Virginia, I looked for a way to raise the questions I wanted to ask. At lunch I watched her comment on American consumerism and Bush’s imperialism to the couple in line ahead of us at the Cracker Barrel. She was having so much fun I didn’t want to interrupt. Once seated, we ate our cornbread and gossiped about the customers at the other tables. I listened while she explained how she’d toilet-trained all the babies over six months old in her refugee camps so they could save the few precious diapers they had for the infants. Let it go, I thought. She should remember what she feels like remembering. That’s enough. But not for nothing did Grandma have a reputation for witchiness. As soon as we got back into the car, she asked about my book.
“I’m writing a story, but is it even your story? I don’t know. I’ve learned so many disconnected things about you—it’s hard to put them into a narrative.”
“What are you talking about? You have all my papers. Like I always say, when I’m gone, you can just publish them and be very rich, like the others.”
“They would need some editing,” I said lightly, thinking of the jumble of writing she’d sent me and the hours I’d spent figuring out what exactly had happened when.
“Sure, sure.” Her voice wasn’t exactly wistful, and it wasn’t exactly bitter. It must be very strange indeed, I thought, to see others rising to fame and supposed fortune just because they had managed to recount their memories in a cogent way. Bearing witness must be the worst kind of celebrity there is. Grandma, of course, had no time to waste on such thoughts. “Don’t you talk to your grandfather?” she pursued.
“Well, yes, but you never have the same stories.”
“Like what? What did he tell you?”
I tried to think of all the questions on my list. “Well, for example, do you remember losing your watch when you were picking grapes in the Pyrenees?”