No matter how she slaved over their babies, the mothers questioned Anna’s every decision: “My skinny self way below one hundred pounds, due to starvation in France, and inability to gain weight on camp food, made me look much younger than my age, and invited mothers to point out my unmarried state and lack of children.” Her response to their objections echoed a warning I’d heard more than once during my teenage years: “What do you have to do to make a baby? Open your legs twice in nine months, that’s what. But to raise a child—that requires experience and wisdom.” In her essay, she’d concluded: “I advised that, having done the former, they should leave it to me to help them with the latter.”
As ever, my grandmother’s heroism entranced me, much as she hated it when I used that word: “The wish of the young to make heroes of individuals who have experienced events—by chance or imposed by circumstances—can be explained by the affection they have for them.” But how else could I describe her losing sleep so new mothers would fear less for their newborns, standing up for her fellow inmates when they went on a hunger strike to protest their insufficient rations, saving a baby’s life by cobbling together an intubation system out of a length of glass tubing and a kerosene stove, or preventing a scarlet fever outbreak in a badly equipped camp by adapting a remedy she remembered from a book about medieval medicine?
Now, though, my need to inhabit my grandmother’s skin, to project myself into her younger self and imagine when she would have had the time to think about my grandfather, to reach out to him, to return to him, made me understand her objections to my calling her a hero. The war had not vaulted her into some special state of being; it had not banished her quotidian self. Her headaches were headaches; her fatigue was fatigue. The cold she felt during the war was not any more—or less—cold than the cold she’d felt during any other period in her life. The beauty of the mountains around her was neither enhanced nor diminished by her current circumstances. She wanted that to be true, in any case. History had robbed her of her right to be ordinary, and she was protesting that injustice.
Maybe that’s why they couldn’t let go of each other: they each held within themselves the memory of who the other person was before the war made them remarkable in ways they had not chosen.
Though I was beginning to lose hope that I ever would find anything to illuminate the mystery of their love and estrangement, I kept combing through the refugee files for any indication that my grandparents had at least crossed paths. With my shaky grasp of German, it was hard to be sure, but as far as I could tell, there was only one recorded instance of my grandparents being in the same place during their time in Switzerland. In May 1944 the chief of police in Bern had written to the Bureau of Civil Internees in Geneva:
Sirs,
We hereby confirm our telephone conversation of earlier today and ask that you grant permission to the following persons to go to “M?sli,” near Zurich, on May 27, 28, and 29, 1944, to participate in a conference of the Oeuvre Suisse d’Entraide Ouvrière:
No. 7808 Mr. Armand Jacoubovitch, born June 13, 1915
c/o Berchtold, 14, Cours de Rive
No. 7130, Miss Anna Münster, born August 8, 1913
c/o Berchtold, 14, Cours de Rive
That was something. As of May 26, 1944, my grandparents lived at the same address. In my faltering German (and with some outside help), I puzzled through the letters that had been written around that date. This time, my patience was rewarded.
July 23, 1944
To: the Swiss Federal Police Offices, Bern
Re: Deposit at the Schweizer Volksbank
In payment for my work at the Sanatorium Sursum in Davos a deposit of 95 Swiss francs was made in my account at the Schweizer Volksbank. Please release this entire amount to me. I make this request because I was married in Geneva last July 12th. Leave to do so was granted so suddenly that I had no time to apply to you to release the necessary funds. My friends placed the necessary funds at my disposal for immediate expenses such as a dress, shoes, and some undergarments, and I must now reimburse them. The receipts for these purchases are available for your inspection at any time.
Please consider that I am in these circumstances because I have been in Switzerland for some 20 months with nothing more than the clothes I had on my back when I crossed the border, and that I badly need to purchase further undergarments, stockings, etc.; so I ask you to disburse me the entire amount I have on deposit.
I thank you in advance for your help and remain respectfully yours,
Dr. Anna Jacoubovitch-Münster
In their entire refugee dossier—hundreds of pages—this letter was the only mention of my grandparents’ marriage. But whether they wed for love, loyalty, or my grandmother’s beautiful black hair, at least now I knew the date: July 12, 1944.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
IT WAS JANUARY 2006, AND ALMOST A YEAR HAD passed since my return to France and the triumphant discovery of that wedding date. I’d waitressed a full season at the Petite Chaumière and taught a semester at the high school in Le Teil. My teaching contract would end in a few months, and when it did, my visa would expire again. Julien and I were sitting in bed in his house on the rue du Code in Alba. We’d done a lot of work on it that year, opening up an office area for me at the top of the stairs, building storage shelves and a countertop, adding a couple of closets, replacing the stove, and planting roses and geraniums alongside the forsythia, honeysuckle, lilac, and oleander. To me, the little house felt like a cozy storybook home, tall and narrow and paneled with wood, like the inside of a tree or a Beatrix Potter illustration inhabited by friendly hedgehogs or chatty field mice. It made me sad to think about leaving again. “What are our options?” Julien asked.
“Well,” I proposed, “I could go back to the States and do this all over again—find another job, or reapply for the teaching program and wait another three months.”
“Or?”
I stared at my hands. “Well, if I start looking now, there’s always the chance I could find a job from here that comes with a visa.”
“But you’d still have to go back and apply for the visa from there, wouldn’t you?”
I nodded. “Yeah, I think so.”
Julien poked me and smiled. “Isn’t there another option?”
In spite of myself, I smiled, too. “Yes.”
“Which is?”
“Which is … we could get married.”
“We could.”
“We could,” I confirmed. “Just like the consulate guy told us to.”