I ignored the ten of hearts. “Did you go inside?”
“Sure not!” She looked at me incredulously. “Go inside? With guards everywhere? Of course I didn’t go inside. But I did rent a little rowboat, and I rowed across to have a look at it. I got real close. I could see the guards. Pick a card,” she interjected, and I obeyed, imagining my grandmother in a little rowboat, the water reflecting on her milky skin and the wind blowing her black curls, watching tiny silhouettes of guards marching like toy soldiers up and down a tree-lined shore, more taken with the image of her than with the geographic location, expecting her to switch courses again and tell me some other tale. “Go inside,” she scoffed instead. “What do you think—he was going to invite me in?”
“Who?”
“When I got back I read in the papers that he was in the house at the time.”
As usual, it was hard to say whether she was ignoring my question or merely answering it sideways. “Hitler?” I persisted. “You mean this was while he was alive?”
She didn’t even give me a sideways answer this time, just looked at me as if to say, Excuse me, but why else would I go see the fancy Hitler vacation house?
I could never tell whether these digressions were a reflection of her overly busy mind or a clever feint to distract me from topics she preferred not to discuss.
CHAPTER THREE
I DID NOT BEGIN TO APPRECIATE WHAT AN EXPLOSIVE topic my grandparents’ marriage might be until I visited my grandfather on my own for the first time, a few months after I turned fourteen. He had forgotten about the safari but not about me, and he invited me to come stay with him for ten days over my spring break.
As a child, I saw very little of my grandfather. The summer after I was born he’d had a linden tree planted in my honor in our front yard, a gesture typical of him in that it was not on time, required more work of other people than it did of him, and was the poetic vehicle for a painful memory he kept secret from the gesture’s recipient. (In this case, the lindens that lined the Boulevard Tauler, the street he grew up on in Strasbourg—which were destroyed, along with his home, during the war.) For years I associated my grandfather with that linden and not much else: I posed there for annual photographs so he could mark the growth of me and the tree; we’d pose there together on the rare occasions he visited us from Geneva.
Armand on one of his rare visits to Asheville, in June 1982 (carefully timed to avoid crossing paths with Anna).
My grandfather, even by my family’s standards, was a uniquely difficult character. He thought nothing of making you peel all the chickpeas in the dish you were preparing because he had recently read that chickpea skins were disruptive to the digestive system. Or of asking you to replace the buttons on your shirt before he left the house with you because he felt they were too gaudy. Or of snubbing you forever if you served him bad wine. He kept binder notebooks on members of the family of whom he particularly disapproved.
The last time he had come to Asheville was in 1990, when I was nine years old. He cut short his stay with us because he thought the guest room smelled of something ineffably and unbearably noxious. When pressed, he compared the scent to mothballs but would say no more than that. He declared it impossible to sleep with such an odor. My mother could not smell it, and that made him even more aggrieved.
This was the man I set off to visit in 1996, having seen him just once in the years following his abbreviated stay. A friend once asked me why my mother let me go see him alone, knowing as we did his extensive capacity for unpleasantness. What can I say? The vicissitudes of my family’s fortunes meant there weren’t many of us left; he was the only grandfather I had.
His apartment in Geneva was like a tiny museum, lined with books and curios, smelling cleanly of bergamot, rosemary, paper and pencil, and pipe tobacco. It was full of clear light that poured in from big picture windows, the ones in his dining room overlooking the Jura, the ones in his living room overlooking the Alps, the Lac Léman, and Geneva’s old town. When I arrived, my grandfather showed me where I would sleep, a daybed in that living room, which also served as his office and guest quarters, and then went to make tea. After tea, he gave me a sponge, blue to match the color scheme in the kitchen, with which I was to wipe away any stray drops of water I might accidentally let fall on the tile floor. There was another one just like it in the bathroom. A mini-vacuum cleaner sat in the corner of the dining room; he pointed it out so I could clean up any crumbs I might drop while eating. He showed me how to brush back the carpet pile where I stepped on it so I wouldn’t scuff it.
I realized quickly that my grandfather was not a maniacally orderly man; he was just intensely territorial. He needed me to cover my tracks.
During those ten days, we grew almost easy with each other, and perhaps I became overconfident, lulled into believing I had gotten the hang of my grandfather and his carpet pile, for one morning at breakfast, when he reached across the table for my hand and asked about the amethyst ring I was wearing, I said, “Maybe you recognize it.” He shook his head, and I added, “It belonged to my grandmother.”
A certain dark stillness settles into the air before a rainstorm bursts out of the sky and sozzles you. In the stillness I noticed my grandfather’s face looked white and drawn, and it occurred to me that perhaps I had made a mistake. “Your grandmother? Your grandmother. May I ask”—he could barely bring himself to say the words—“may I ask whether you … whether you see her regularly?”
I nodded. Abruptly, he pushed himself away from the table and snatched up our breakfast things. He set them in the sink, jerked the faucet on, and began washing. “And what do you think of her?”
“Well,” I began, trying to be prudent, “she’s my grandmother, and I—”
My grandfather snapped off the water, and the sentence faded in my mouth. He turned to face me. “You’ll have to be forgiven for that, I suppose. You do not know her as I do.”
That was certainly true, so I shook my head.
“Do you know what I call her?”
I shook my head again.
“Seraphina. In irony, of course.” He jerked the faucet back on and resumed rinsing the dishes. I did not know what to say. “She left me, you know,” he fumed.