My grandmother and I didn’t speak about my grandfather again during the rest of her visit to Asheville. “You can put them in a letter,” she said, when I tried to ask her questions. “I can’t—it makes me too tired. To think I used to believe being blind was worse than being deaf,” she added, the closest she ever got to complaining about herself. Between my shifts at the New Age bookstore, we sat in her living room, with the flowered, fringed tablecloth and the Russian flag in the hand-thrown vase, and played Rummikub, which she called “The Game,” since it was the only one she knew, other than solitaire. I’d play as slowly as I could, as if to stall time by doing so. “Don’t do me any favors,” she’d remonstrate whenever she saw I might be letting her win. So I’d pull myself together and beat her every time, contesting, for old time’s sake, all the rules and exceptions she’d woven into her game. “Got time for another?” she’d ask at the end of each round, sweeping the Rummikub tiles into the plastic ice cream tub she kept them in. And I’d shake my head in admiration at the zest and adventure my grandmother managed to inject into everything, even a game she’d played a million times, and we’d play again.
One time she told my fortune, and one time I told hers. I don’t remember what we said to each other, except that we agreed on one thing: people get their fortunes told for one reason only—they want you to tell them that everything will be all right.
“And of course you can, or of course you can’t. It all depends on how you look at it. Take your grandfather. Nothing was ever all right with him.”
I nodded. “And you—”
“As I say, whatever comes, comes for the best. Gratitude is the most important human emotion.”
She put the cards back in their pile and gave her little birdlike cackle that reminded me of things pleasant and prickly and salty, like cocktail crackers or pickled beets. And then she looked at me, just as she had once or twice before in my life, and said, “You’re like me, Mirandali. You’ll sourrwvive.”
Now I understood it was a command, not a prediction. And I looked at her indomitable smile, the coal-black streaks in her silver hair, and the turquoise and gold earrings quivering in her ears and wished for a lifetime more with her to figure out exactly what sourrwviving entailed.
But there wouldn’t be a lifetime more of years, I knew. Anyway, Grandma had planted the seeds of my sourrwvival long ago. Sooner than I expected, and despite the grouchy man at the consulate, I got a job in Le Teil as an English teaching assistant, which came with a work visa from September to April. September was six months away, just the length of the tourist visa for which I was eligible after my three months in the United States. I gave my notice at the bookstore and bought a ticket back to France. “Good,” Grandma declared when it was time to say goodbye. “Good for you. Don’t come back,” she reminded me, pushing away the hug I’d attempted to give her.
Julien came straight from work, dressed in plaster-spattered clothes, to pick me up at the train station. He’d bashed his lip with a hammer the day before. I’d been traveling for the past thirty hours and was wearing an oversize hand-me-down coat that made me look like a homeless highland shepherd. I needed a shower, and I probably also needed a haircut. Certainly, if you had seen us from afar, or even up close, that morning in early March 2005, we wouldn’t have looked particularly romantic. But in my memory, our reunion was a soaring, violin-tinged affair, filled with the peculiar yellow-gray light that suffuses the winter sky in the Dauphiné. We stood and hugged amid the noises of the trains and the echoing footsteps of other travelers, and just as I had that summer in the pool and that autumn in Julien’s wood-paneled house, I felt the full weight and force of my own life, lived for myself and not for the past or my grandparents. Our hands and faces were the only parts of us uncovered in the cold air. We touched them together almost shyly. Then, arm in arm, we walked out to the parking lot and got into the car, headed for Alba, headed for home.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
WHILE CONVINCED THIS ADDITIONAL YEAR IN France was simply a brief pause in my real life, I also shipped over a throw pillow, a couple of coffee mugs, a challah plate, and a handmade quilt, the items I’d been saving ever since my obsession with homes had evolved from building little dioramas to collecting actual objects. Julien’s coming-home present to me was even less temporary-seeming: he surprised me with an antique writing desk restored by a friend of his. An outside observer, or perhaps my grandmother, would have thought we at least sensed the meaning of these gestures, but one of the things that made our relationship work so well was our shared faith in the impermanence of all things.
So for a few months, I continued to believe I was on a kind of warm-weather hiatus, writing a fairy tale—calamitous as it might be—in a fairy-tale setting. Three or four days a week I waitressed at my friend Fran?oise’s restaurant in La Roche, serving boeuf aux mille épices and lavender crème caramel to happy tourists and friendly regulars. Julien and I would wake up together and have coffee and croissants, and once he left for work, I’d sit and write until it was time to leave for the restaurant. From time to time, we went to see my grandfather, whose condition, to my great relief, seemed stable enough.
During my stay in Asheville, my mother had given me the AUBETTE dish, a tiny shred of evidence that my grandparents’ love had, at some point, truly existed. Why else would they have carried it so long and so far? I looked at it a great deal but held it sparingly, as if I might rub off the last remains of their past. It smelled like my grandmother in reverse, mostly metal and a tiny whiff of roses. I reasoned and insisted it into a symbol of all they couldn’t say to each other, or to me.
Armand in an internment camp in Wald, Switzerland, March 1943.
Anna in 1942, a head shot most likely taken by the Swiss border police.