Anna and Armand were starved—for food, for affection, for comfort, for beauty. And now they had a single afternoon to fill up on all those things. Fixing my mind on the details of that lunch, I felt a kind of hyperawareness in the two of them, a sensation of observing and being observed. Perhaps my grandparents worried their hunger and poverty would make them seem like savages; perhaps, to the contrary, they saw a kind of brutishness in the plush affluence of their hosts. Either way, they must have felt the Koppelmans’ eyes on them as they lifted their glasses to their mouths, sliced their meat, and wiped their fingers on the soft cloth of the napkins. And at the same time, Anna and Armand must have noted every word the other said, every glance across the table, every motion the other did or didn’t make. It was August 1943, and they had not seen each other for eight months.
My grandmother summed up the afternoon in a single sentence: “They liked your charming, well-read grandfather.” The strange economy of her hurried writing again both masked and highlighted the way she cohabited with tragedy: “K’s only sister and child were not saved early enough by him bringing them to Switzerland, and she died, having become mad from starvation and running naked through the Transnistrian concentration camp, where my mother’s brother and family also died.”
My grandmother’s entry and exit passes confirmed that she had been released from Bienenberg for a weeklong training program, but I couldn’t tell when or how my grandfather had obtained leave from his camp in Arisdorf. Thinking back to his story about going to church, I wondered whether he had hidden a part of what happened that Sunday.
There was no clue as to whether they spent even a moment alone together that day, whether Armand had time to murmur a few words to Anna that patched up or palliated their separation, everything they had endured or inflicted in their struggle to survive. What breathless shock must have bolted through the air when they first saw each other: I imagined my grandfather trying to gather his thoughts, turbulent as snowflakes, my grandmother flashing that search-lamp smile. An afternoon would not have been enough time for their idealized memories of each other to chafe against the reality of being together; it only would have been sufficient to rekindle a ghost of the spark that had flown across the table in the Café Aubette so many years before. There is a faint reason to believe he proposed to her then, in the hurried privacy of a hello or a goodbye, for my grandmother’s letter went on to say, “They approved of my marriage to Armand.” I imagined everything they had forgotten, given up, left behind, floating between them like a curl of smoke. Anna had spent the previous months cradling and examining other people’s babies, but to Armand, Anna’s hair and skin likely would have been his first tender contact with another body since they’d parted ways, the softest, most sweetly scented thing he had touched in months. I remembered my grandfather’s broken voice the one time I’d had the courage to ask why he’d married her. “What else could I do?” he had cried.
Seen in that light, it was only inevitable that he would have said those three words: “Anna, marry me.”
But if I had hoped for some romantic detail, a hint of the dizzy lurch they must have felt leaning toward each other, some shred of evidence that Armand had reached into his pocket and placed a small silver dish in Anna’s hand to pledge their troth, all I received was another tightly compressed line with which my grandmother occluded still more pathos. “[The Koppelmans] greeted my pregnancy with your mother as irresponsible on my part, which ended my contact with them.” I was appalled at this well-to-do Swiss couple weighing in on the probity of my grandparents’ life choices. “But your grandfather repaid our 300 S.F. debt when he worked for the French Ministry of Justice who hired him for Nuremberg,” Grandma added, and for once, my grandfather’s stupendous acts of subtle hostility seemed jubilantly, ferociously fitting. My grandmother moved on to my second question:
Berchtold was the middle age French woman widowed by her Swiss husband, where [your grandfather] found lodging when liberated from camp to study in Geneva at the école d’Interprètes at the University. Forgot her first name, could be Irma. (Your grdf should remember she was very fond of him, not so me, but let me stay at her lovely apt. with elevator to 4th floor with balcony over the street). There I got pregnant when living with him and attending the 6 month course “pour réfugiés d’après guerre.” I saw her regularly when I visited from America and after my separation from your grandf. She was employed during WWII by the International Red Cross to research the whereabouts of French prisoners of war and you all had three names because she explained to me that someone … could only safely be traced by a second or third different name.
I marveled at everything she had packed into that paragraph: her nagging insecurity that my grandfather’s refined allure was more potent than her guileless, tactless charm; her faithful visits to her onetime landlady long after etiquette would have allowed her to stop; the odd formulation she used to account for the conception of their child; and tacked on at the end, an explanation for our all having three given names, which I always had chalked up to my family’s eccentricity. Not a word, though, about what it had been like to live with Armand.
In the geriatric ward, the doctor encouraged me to speak with my grandfather about his past. This, of course, I was eager to do. I mentioned the Koppelmans, and his face darkened. “Terrible people,” he sniffed. “They don’t merit any discussion.”
I tried Mrs. Berchtold. This time, he looked dreamy. “Yes, she was very kind to me at one time. Very kind. I stopped speaking to her, after the war, though. She appeared to have taken sides with your grandmother.” As always, he uttered those words as if they carried dangerous, ominous overtones, “and so you see I had to stop all contact with her.”
“Do you remember living in Rive, during the war?”
“Rive. That’s in Geneva. I used to live there.”
“You still do.”
“No, no,” Grandpa shook his head.
“Where do you live, then?”
He looked at me haughtily. “I’m afraid I’ve not been provided with the information necessary to answer that question.”