“Oh, yes. Thank you for reminding me.” He stood to look for them, then sat down. “I’m afraid I don’t know what I did with them.”
“It’s all right.” I poured the tea into his ordinary tea bowls, and when we had finished drinking it, we wished each other good night. My grandfather went to brush his teeth, and I shut the door to the sitting room and sat down on my bed, the little daybed full of memories that were only mine now. I had thought after Abah’s death that I never would cry again, but of course we all have room in our hearts for infinite measures of love and loss. I put my face in my hands and wept. When I saw my grandfather’s light go out, I called Julien and told him everything. “I’m going to have to find him a nursing home.” I felt far away, frightened, homeless.
“It’s going to be all right,” Julien reassured me, just as he had when my father had gotten sick. “We’ll do it together. It will be okay.”
As it turned out, my grandfather got along quite well with the system of nurses, social workers, and health aides I’d set up, at least until Julien and I were settled in Paris. My job in the translation firm started before Julien had wrapped up his commitments in Alba, so for the first eight months I lived in a nearly empty studio in Belleville. I had a futon bed, two camp chairs, a pot, a bowl, two coffee mugs, and a single set of silverware. My neighbors included my neurotic landlady who was terrified of the floor buffer machine the super used to clean the front hall, and a woman in the garden apartment below my balcony who drank whiskey outdoors on warm nights and intoned “Plus jamais, plus jamais” into the darkness in a gravelly, throaty voice. On weeknights, I’d walk through the city or write to my grandmother; on weekends, I took the train home to Julien, or he visited Paris.
Eventually, I tired of my solitary and wildly expensive apartment and rented a room in my friend Eve’s house in Fontenay-sous-Bois, just outside the city. Eve, aware that I was supposed to be writing a book, set up an office for me, but I just sat looking at my notes or rifling through my grandmother’s letters, without making any progress. Maybe I felt lost and displaced without a real home and without Julien; maybe I was sick of all the sadness and the space it had occupied in my life; maybe taking care of my grandfather left me too depleted to bring him to life on the page. Maybe all those things, but most of all, I had realized that I was now the keeper of whatever memories I’d gathered from my grandfather. The rest were disappearing or already gone. And what do you do when a silence vanishes into a different, vaster kind of oblivion? I’d spent a good part of my life searching for the words of the tragic, angry poem of Anna and Armand. And now it was evaporating, along with legions of other words I now recognized it was my job to remember and record. The task was too daunting. It was a long eight months.
It seemed to me I’d cut myself off and drifted away, from the United States, from my book, from my plans to become a historian, all for that unprecedented feeling of happiness that unfurled inside me when I was with Julien. And now I was alone in Paris, translating the minutes of shareholders’ annual meetings and copy for perfume advertisements, with none of the things I’d abandoned along the way to Julien—and no Julien, either.
At my new job, I exercised my genetic predisposition for translation and interpreting—was this, too, a gift to fall back on, to help us sourrwvive? There was my grandmother: When Erna and her roommate at four a.m. were woken up and me to interpret … And my grandfather, of course, had studied German literature in Strasbourg and then attended interpreting school in Geneva during the war. Translation is writing without the commitment; interpreting is an invisible and evanescent form of brilliance performed on someone else’s words. They are ghostly occupations, best suited to those who, for one reason or another, do not have a place they call home.
My office was in the Fifth Arrondissement, right across from the ?le de la Cité. The bathroom, on the top floor, overlooked the Cathedral of Notre-Dame, and though it was cold and drafty up there, I loved to sit and stare at the view. I’d been inspired to study history on my first visit to the cathedral; I remembered touching the stone pillars in the nave and feeling a kind of electric ripple as I imagined the hands that had carved them. I knew my own hands were lingering in places those long-gone fingers had been. That, I thought, was history. Now I realized that the electric ripple that had so entranced me was not history but rather the gulf that separates the past from the present. I felt the same ripple, and the same gulf, when I touched the AUBETTE dish. History, I had learned, was easy enough to write. But not emptiness. What can you do but stare when confronted with an ever-widening gulf?
The worst part was watching the gulf swallow my grandparents. My grandmother’s letters grew shorter and shorter. She rarely complained, but she had no illusions about the future:
My health—as expected at my age—is deteriorating, not as fast as I wish, as lingering I find very painful and unsatisfactory.
That summer, during a heat wave in Geneva, the nurse who visited my grandfather every day called to tell me he had been admitted to the hospital. When I reached the attending physician, she explained that he’d gotten the flu and become dehydrated. When the emergency room doctors tried to insert an IV, he’d panicked and become aggressive, then suffered a minor heart attack. He was recovering nicely, she assured me, and he’d be able to speak to me the next day, when he was out of intensive care.
“I was with him last week,” I said. “He seemed fine. What happened?”
“Dehydration occurs very quickly in older patients, and it often aggravates senility.”
“Irreversibly?”
“I’m afraid so,” she admitted, and then added, “I take it he’s a Holocaust survivor.”
“How did you know?”
“I gathered from a few of the names he called me.”
“I’m sorry. That must be pretty hard to take when you’re caring for someone.”
“We get used to it. It’s pretty common, actually.”
“What, for your patients to accuse you of being a Nazi?”
She laughed. “In a geriatric ward? You’d be surprised. But I meant the memory loss. It’s pretty common for people with painful war trauma to lose their memory. That, and marriages gone bad.”
The next day, when I called my grandfather’s room, he sounded relieved and incredulous. “Thank goodness you reached me. They were keeping me in some sort of prison.”
“You’re in the hospital.” I tried to sound soothing and reassuring. The attending nurse had told me he’d barricaded himself in his room all night, pushing all the furniture against the door and screaming bloody murder when they tried to enter.