I learned from the refugee records that Anna and Armand spent four months in Madame Berchtold’s apartment on the Cours de Rive. They were required to report to the Geneva central police station every Monday to prove they weren’t violating any rules, hiding any illegal refugees, holding any unauthorized jobs, engaging in any political activities, or working as spies. For four months they slept in a bed of their own, cooked meals, went shopping, followed the news. Would they have heard that French troops had pushed through to the Rhine and captured Strasbourg?
I knew from my grandmother how much the two of them wanted a baby. At the end of the summer, a doctor—a colleague perhaps, or someone treating her for the pellagra she’d contracted in the camps—told my grandmother that years of starvation had shrunk her uterus to the size of a walnut. He said there was no hope. My grandmother went to another doctor and another. By December, the Battle of the Bulge had begun, and hopes flagged. A million men fighting in the woods, in the snow. The Allies registered huge losses.
My grandmother found a doctor who was researching the benefits of high doses of vitamins. He gave her regular vitamin K injections and told her not to worry. The Nazi forces withdrew from the Ardennes. The Soviets captured Warsaw; they liberated Auschwitz. Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin met at Yalta. By January, my grandmother was pregnant.
When I finished assembling this chronology of events, I read it to Julien.
“Can I see that?” He took the paper from me and scanned it. “Do you really associate your mother’s conception with the Battle of the Bulge?”
“I’m being symbolic.”
“Come on,” he objected. “They must have known better than to pin their lives on the ups and downs of the war. Did they even know what was going on?” Julien flipped through the stack of travel permits I’d assembled. “It doesn’t look like they saw much of each other.”
“No!” I exclaimed. “That’s why I’m reduced to the damn Battle of the Bulge. Even afterward—if you look here, they lived together from November 14, 1944, till”—I shuffled through the pages—“1944 … November, December, January, February, 1945 … till March 6, 1945.”
“That’s it?” Julien picked up my grandmother’s letter again. “Where did she go on March 6?”
“To a professional course of some sort.” I found a letter from her refugee file and read aloud:
Major de Rham, who greatly appreciated Mme. Dr. Jacoubovitch’s services during her time in Leysin, has asked her to run a course being organized in les Diablerets. Given that Mme. Dr. Jacoubovitch is pregnant, this will allow her to continue her excellent work under less physically tiring conditions than in her current post in the sanatorium. Mme. Dr. Jacoubovitch has enthusiastically accepted the proposal. She will, naturally, be performing this work as a volunteer.
I flipped forward a few pages. “And here it says her permit was extended to July 31, 1945. Do you think they were avoiding each other?”
“How much choice could they have had?” Julien asked. “Wouldn’t they have had to take whatever jobs were being offered? Where was your grandfather?”
“In Geneva.” I handed him another of my grandmother’s letters from the file, this one in my grandmother’s handwriting:
Since my letters of July 9 and 25 went unanswered, I am taking the liberty of confirming the information I gave therein, and I ask again that you notify me of your continued approval. As my contract with the Military Hospital ended on July 31, I advised the Commandant at Leysin that I would be traveling to Geneva, where I would like to remain until my husband, who will be repatriated to France around August 25, 1945, leaves the city. Please allow me to go to Sierre after his departure. My delivery date has been estimated for mid-September, and I would like to be certain that I can prepare for the event at the La Providence maternity hospital, whose director is a friend of mine.
“I guess they spent a few weeks together right before she gave birth,” I said. “And then my grandfather left the country, to start preparing for the Nuremberg Trials.”
“So once they were married, they lived with each other for”—Julien counted—“November, December … four months—and then maybe three weeks before your grandfather left.”
“Plus the five-day leaves she talked about in her letter,” I pointed out. “That would make … two leaves—ten more days.”
“What do you think those months were like?”
I recalled the picture in my mother’s album of my grandmother leaning against the railing on Madame Berchtold’s balcony and gazing at my grandfather.
“Maybe that was their problem,” Julien suggested. “Maybe they’d spent so much time apart, they’d started to idealize each other, and it was a disappointment to live with the real thing.”
I was still thinking of the photo and the erotic tension it seemed to betray. “Or maybe they spent just enough time together to keep idealizing each other, and the disappointment set in later.”
“When the war was over,” my grandmother wrote on a page in her notebook titled “Free Associations,”
for me it was strange, to feel so little, not to say nothing. All the—over four years—of hoping, waiting, imagining what it would be like, what I am going to do, flew away, when the moment of realization that it had really happened arrived. And then suddenly, doubt, fear, what now? Put together a life, different because the world was different, was it possible? Could one do it? Another memory was the sadness for what had been lost, the carnage, cruelty, and inhumanity, never dreamt of it could exist, became a burden to be part of one’s life from now on, not to be forgotten or repressed because it would be an insult to the victims, and only our memory could serve their heroism or cowardice. I remember becoming busy, with what? as if to rush into what would be real life, as if the other one during the war years, wasn’t or hadn’t been real.
Indeed, everything seemed to accelerate in 1945. My grandmother returned to her work as a physician; my grandfather completed his training as an interpreter and was recruited to work at the Nuremberg Trials. On August 22, 1945, my grandfather left Geneva for Paris, with a laissez-passer that read:
It has been Switzerland’s privilege to offer you shelter in your time of need. It was not always possible for us to give everything we might have wished to the numerous refugees to whom we offered asylum. We hope nevertheless that your stay in Switzerland was of service to you and we wish you all the best for the future and the future of your country.