In mid-April 2005, after I learned that my work visa had been approved, I flew back to the States to pick it up, in time to celebrate my stepfather’s seventy-first birthday, on May 23. My stepfather was what the French would call mon papa de coeur, my “heart-father.” I called him “Abah,” which means “Daddy” in Hebrew. In my later childhood, he had been the most present of my parents, the one who cooked me breakfast, shuttled me to and from school, and waited up for me at night. He was the rock in my life, my very definition of stability. The week I bought my ticket to Asheville, Abah had lost function in his left arm and went to see a neurologist for a battery of tests. By May 23 we knew he had a deadly brain tumor. That trip was the last time I saw him upright.
I returned to Alba for six weeks, during which Julien and I worked so much we barely saw each other, I as a waitress on lunch and dinner shifts and he on a project that required him to be at work before six in the morning. By the time I got home at night, he was asleep, and he left for his job long before I woke up.
The Internet had recently come to Alba, and one day, on a break between shifts, I thought to look up the Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names on the Yad Vashem website.
I entered my grandfather’s family name, and more than a thousand records appeared. I went back and entered my great-grandmother’s first name as well, which narrowed the search results to 167. Feeling a familiar chill, I searched through the list until I came to a woman from Strasbourg. I clicked the name and saw a dim image of my great-grandmother on a page of testimony submitted by my grandfather’s eldest brother. I followed a link to the other pages he had submitted. There were my great-grandparents, my grandfather’s sister-in-law, Rose, and Paul, her son. Rose had been deported in Convoy Number 8, on July 20, 1942, when she was twenty-eight. Gitla and Leon had been deported in Convoy Number 45, on November 11, 1942, the very day Anna had returned from her visit with Rosie and spent the night in Perpignan with her accidental savior, the very day the Germans invaded the French Free Zone.
I typed “Convoy No. 45, November 11, 1942, Auschwitz” into the search engine, which brought me to Serge and Beate Klarsfeld’s memorial, “Chronological Table of Deportation Convoys.” Convoy Number 45 was sent from Drancy to Auschwitz carrying 745 people, 634 adults and 111 children. Five hundred and ninety-nine were gassed on arrival, and two were alive when the camp was liberated in 1945. I sat back from the computer screen, as if the numbers might reach out and pull me into one of the nightmares I so feared.
If this was a fairy tale, then I was Little Red Riding Hood, crossing into the dark wood at whose edges I had grown up, whose shadows had tinged my grandmother’s stories and ringed the light cast by the Shabbat candles at my grandfather’s table. Perhaps my grandparents’ strange silence and byzantine story were merely an effort to prevent me from going down that path, straight into the mouth of the wolf. I felt ashamed of my illusions about love affairs and ruined houses. Tables, lines, numbers; Convoy 45, November 11, 1942: this was the weight I was supposed to carry.
Abah’s tumor symptoms worsened, and Julien and I took time off from our jobs to return to Asheville and help my family care for him. The Sunday before we were supposed to leave, Julien’s maternal grandmother died. We booked a train to Paris for the next day, so we could be at the funeral, where I met most of Julien’s family for the first time. We mourned his grandmother, then boarded the plane to Asheville, where we spent the rest of the summer with Abah as the tumor laid waste to him. He died on August 21, 2005.
After the funeral, I surrendered to my grief. I hacked off all my hair. I wept a lot. I shut down. I couldn’t bear to be touched. And I whirled dangerously close to a Charybdis of guilt over leaving my mother, who had been chronically ill since my early teenage years. Somehow she had pulled herself together to care for Abah, with astonishing force and energy, but now she was all alone, and I was terrified that if I left her, she would wilt like a vine without a stake to cling to. By some strange miracle of synchronicity, my return flight to France with Julien had been booked for the day following Abah’s memorial service, and as it approached, I was overcome with self-reproach. Wondering whether I should stay, I caused an explosion in my relationship with Julien, one of the few we’ve ever had.
“You can’t take care of everyone forever,” he exclaimed. “Your grandfather, your father, your mother—who’s next? Who will be after that? When is it your turn?”
“But they need me.”
“I need you, too,” Julien objected. The two of us were sitting in the car, on our way to pick up some MRI scans that had been taken too late to be of any use or interest. “And more important, you need you. What’s it going to be? At some point, you’re going to have to live your own life.”
Unbidden, a memory of a moment a week or two before Abah’s death floated into my head, when Abah could no longer move or speak and Julien and I were sitting by him as he lay in a hospital bed in my parents’ room. Julien had brought Abah roses from the garden, twining them onto his oxygen tube so he could smell a little bit of summer. The roses looked like a boutonniere, and I couldn’t help thinking of all the times Abah and I had talked about what my wedding would be like, idly, with no special person in mind, just because we liked celebrations. Once he’d asked me whether I would make him wear a tux for the ceremony, and I’d told him he could wear whatever he wanted. “Maybe I’ll wear one,” he’d said. “Maybe it’ll be hot pink.” We’d laughed because we’d both have gotten exactly the same kick out of a hot pink tuxedo. Now, holding his hand as he lay in bed with a posy of roses fading over the pocket of his T-shirt, which also happened to be hot pink, I saw with brutal finality that he would never be at my wedding. And then I looked across the bed at Julien, steadfast and caring as he gripped my father’s other hand, and I thought, Maybe this is stronger than walking down the aisle. There are other consecrations than a wedding. Maybe this is one of them.
So I got on that flight with Julien. We went back to Alba and continued the process of braiding our lives together. I worked my jobs. I waited to surface from my grief. I didn’t write anymore. I sat next to our new woodstove and read novels or stared into space. I corresponded with my grandmother about the minutiae of our daily lives. On my trips to Geneva, I watched over my grandfather’s worsening forgetfulness, wondering when I was going to have to intervene and what exactly I would do when the time came.
Now, sitting in bed with Julien on that January night in 2006, I thought over the whole sad, hard year, the bad storms our relationship had withstood. And I remembered the night when we held my father’s hand and watched the roses move up and down on his chest. Life has already married us, I thought. Our happiness has been weatherproofed.
We turned to face each other, smiling big, uncontrollable smiles.
“I know this is serious,” Julien said.
“It is,” I agreed, still smiling.
“What do you think?”
“I’m not sure there’s anything to think about. If you see what I mean. What do you think?”
“Well,” reasoned Julien, “if I’m going to spend the rest of my life with someone, and I’m going to have children with them—then that person is clearly you.”
“I feel the same way.”
“Well, there you go.”