Grandpa looked blank.
“You mean … you mean Anna Munster?” I suppressed an urge to look around and make sure the building was still standing. It was the first time in my life I had uttered her name in his presence.
He nodded slowly. “Yes, that’s her. That’s the name. She’s the one.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
THANKS TO THE GOOD OFFICES OF MY GRANDFATHER’S niece and her husband (with whom Armand had been close and then, as was typical of him, stopped speaking to years ago for a mysterious set of reasons he kept recorded in a special binder he would brandish at me from time to time), Grandpa was placed on the emergency list of Geneva’s one Jewish nursing home. In the spring of 2007, his social worker called to let me know there was a room available for him. I traveled to Geneva to prepare for the move, and Julien joined me that weekend to help get him settled.
When we opened the door to my grandfather’s apartment, the familiar scent of bergamot, rosemary, paper and pencil, and pipe tobacco bowled me over. I stopped on the threshold, and Julien squeezed my hand. “Think of how much better off he’ll be,” he reminded me. This was undeniably true. I squared my shoulders, and we stepped inside.
I took out the list the nursing home had given me: trousers, shirts, underwear, socks …“All his clothes are in there.” I gestured at the blue lacquered doors of his bedroom wardrobe, lowering my voice as if we might disturb someone. “I guess I’ll take care of his toiletries and the personal things.” We began making neat piles on the bed.
Still shy of invading Grandpa’s privacy, I waited until everything else had been packed before I emptied the drawer of his bedside table. While Julien organized bags to be brought down to the car, I gingerly tugged it open. Inside was an unmarked, unsealed manila envelope. Out of it, I pulled a photocopied booklet folded in half over a single sheet of paper, a letter. “Dear Monsieur Jacoubovitch,” it read,
The French State wishes to extend its deepest regrets over its part in the deportation and subsequent death of your parents, Leon and Augustine Jacoubovitch.
There was the deportation date, their arrival date in Auschwitz, and nothing more. Nothing about the state’s great guilt, nothing about the suffering it had inflicted, no real apology, nothing. Just that terrible withering down to numbers, place names, and dates. I lifted the letter and saw the title of the booklet beneath it: Suicide, mode d’emploi. Suicide: A Manual.
Julien was outside, loading the car. I was alone in the apartment.
Not knowing what else to do, I folded the papers and put them back into the envelope. I sat on the bed for a moment, holding my grandfather’s terrible secret. It occurred to me again that his dementia might be a reprieve, granting him the freedom to live a few years with those unspeakable memories effaced, to be relieved of the task of remembering.
I directed my attention once more to the drawer, wondering what red thread he’d clung to all those years, what had kept him from following through with the instructions in that manual. The drawer was empty, save for a travel alarm clock and an old wallet. I opened the wallet. It looked empty, too, but I looked through the pockets anyway. In one of them I found a white rectangle marked with a date. I took it out and turned it over. It was a photograph of my grandmother. She was young and beautiful, smiling for the camera, her black hair curled around her face and a polka-dotted scarf knotted around her neck. I looked at the date again: July 12, 1944—my grandparents’ wedding day.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
LATER, MUCH LATER, MY GRANDMOTHER FINALLY told me about her married life, what little she had of it. In an essay titled “Marriage,” she confirmed what I already had observed in my grandparents’ refugee files:
Married life consisted of being together during my leaves from camp, every 6 weeks for five days until I was recognized to have pellagra … which liberated me from camp and allowed me to participate in a 6 months course (on scholarship) preparing a group of individuals for after-war assistance in the East when camps, prisons, and populations were freed from Nazi occupation.
I wondered if either of my grandparents thought to comment on the irony of being brought together twice by the same nutritional deficiency, first in the dissertation Armand had helped Anna to edit and then in its physical manifestation in my grandmother. Pellagra causes skin lesions, hair loss, and edema, as well as disorientation and confusion. In my experience, my grandfather’s penchant for venom disappeared in the face of others’ weakness or suffering, and I hoped he had been kind to my grandmother in the first weeks of their life together in the room they rented from Madame Berchtold. In another letter, Grandma wrote:
We were so busy, that except for meals or evenings we hardly saw each other, or weekends. But there, I became probably more aware of the opinion he had of me as, yes, a well educated, but unsophisticated Romanian peasant, one of his favorite insults among many others. I had a strong and well-established ego from home and always knew that his insults revealed more about himself than me. At work, in studies, I was usually well appreciated and regarded; preventing a total break, though often during our relationship, I thought I had come close to it.
What really ended the marriage was my discovery that affective and cognitive development can be totally divorced from each other. By that I mean that intellectual understanding and brilliance in abstract notions had little or nothing to do with affection, empathic feelings, and consequently the need to respect others’ aspirations and meet them. The shock of this discovery revealed also, in great part, my na?veté, having been dazzled by the brilliance, but also the underlying hardness (like a diamond), never guessed.