“Yes, they moved me. They let me out. I’m still under arrest, but now I’m in some sort of hotel.”
Your heart really does ache for people, I thought. The expression is true. I could hear all the old fears chattering around inside him. “It’s not a hotel,” I explained. “And you’re not under arrest. I promise. They’re taking care of you. It’s a care facility—a kind of hospital.”
“No, no, it’s a hotel.”
“It’s a place called the H?pital de Lo?x, in Bernex.”
“No, no, Bernex is hundreds of kilometers away.”
“No, Bernex is near Geneva, and you’re in Bernex.”
“I have no way of verifying that.”
“Grandpa, you’re all right.” I was at a loss for what to tell him. “You’re going to be all right. I promise.”
“I would have called before, but I don’t have any money. Not a cent.”
“You do, Grandpa. It’s fine. Everything’s fine. Your money is all in the bank, and you can get at it.”
“They took everything from me when I came here.” His outrage was palpable. “They stripped me and searched me. Even my coin purse—my billfold, my knife, my watch, my pen—I can’t even find my glasses.”
I’d been trying to cure myself of the habit of linking everything to my grandparents’ past, but in this moment, the connection was unavoidable. I could see, in my mind’s eye, the page from my grandfather’s police deposition:
Mr. Jacoubovitch presented himself voluntarily at the Zurich Central Police Station as a political refugee today. He declared that he had traveled here from France, and [believed he had] crossed the Swiss border on the night of December 10–11, 1942, near Champéry/Wallis.
1 Billfold with misc. papers.
1 Pair spectacles with case.
1 Knife.
1 Coin purse.
1 Watch.
1 Fountain pen.
1 Mechanical pencil.
“He has to go to a nursing home,” the attending physician declared the following week. “I can’t release him in his own charge. I’ll put in for a transfer to a long-stay geriatric unit until you find a place.”
“It’s good you’re there to take care of him,” Grandma wrote again, when I told her of the latest development in Grandpa’s life. “He’d be lost without you.” For the first time, it occurred to me that her interest in his welfare was rather extraordinary after all those years of bad blood.
I cannot let their story go, I thought, as I began looking for a nursing home. I cannot let them disappear like this. I have to figure out what happened.
By then Julien had begun his new job restoring historical monuments in Versailles, and we finally had moved into an apartment together, in the Fifteenth Arrondissement in Paris. He left for work at 6:30 a.m., so I spent the mornings before I departed for the office paging through the refugee files, buoyed by the wild hope that I had missed something, that my grandparents might have been interned in the same camp, or at least the same town, so that I could explain their reunion by a stunning coincidence. I decided to plot a map of all the places that appeared on their entry and exit passes, and in this way I traced them through camps and villages across Switzerland—Wald, Arisdorf, Olsberg, Wesen, Montana, Bienenberg, Finhaut, Territet. My hope deflated—carefully rereading their files merely confirmed that they had never been interned in the same place—then rebounded when I noticed that Arisdorf and Bienenberg were neighboring villages, less than five miles apart.
With a new sense of urgency, I wrote to my grandmother about the two moments I knew they’d spent near each other—their time in Arisdorf and Bienenberg and their residence at the mysterious “chez Berchtold.”
In her replies, I noticed my grandmother stumbling over her English—another sign of the widening gulf between now and then, between remembering in silence and the oblivion of forgetting.
“Only once was I able to meet Armand in Basel for lunch with the Koppelmans. The last letter before end of war received from my mother had the latters’ address in Switzerland.” What fear and tension were concealed in my grandmother’s dense, newly shaky handwriting, a lifetime of emotion concealed in those two words: “last letter.” Of course Grandma did not dwell on this final, frantic gesture from mother to child, a wave in the direction of a relative Mina hoped could help. Grandma had stayed with Mr. Koppelman and his wife in Basel during a weeklong course on refugee care in which she’d been enrolled by the Swiss refugee camp administration. “The K’s lived in a huge apartment on the outskirts of town in new apartment building complete with fancy beautifully uniformed maid and impressive valuable art.”
The book on Swiss refugee camps that included interviews with my grandfather describes the living conditions in the camp in Arisdorf, from which he would have traveled to lunch with my grandmother that day:
Lodged in barracks, the refugees slept in dormitories in groups of about forty, on straw mattresses stacked on bunk beds.… To wash in the morning, one had to go outside and use cold water, when it wasn’t frozen, in which case the refugees rubbed snow on their faces.
Grandpa’s great antipathy toward the very rich, which I always had ascribed to a mix of ideology and jealousy, suddenly seemed human and inevitable when I pictured his arrival at the Koppelmans’ luxurious apartment and his bewildered recollection that he, Anna, and Erna owed these prosperous people a “dette d’honneur,” three hundred Swiss francs loaned for train travel when the three had arrived in Switzerland.
Alone at my desk in our apartment in Paris, I listened to the city come awake and tried to will myself into the recesses of my grandmother’s memory, into the mind of a gaunt, black-haired young woman perched on the edge of a costly sofa, wearing someone’s cast-off clothing, drinking an apéritif, and waiting for her lover to arrive. I thought of Dora Bruder, in which Patrick Modiano describes his own attempt to write about the silent past:
I believe … at times, in a gift of clairvoyance in [writers.]… It is simply part of the job: the efforts of imagination necessary to this work, the need to fix one’s mind on points of detail—and this in an obsessive manner … all this tension, these cerebral gymnastics, might possibly provoke, over time, brief intuitions “concerning past or future events.”