“You see,” he said, and though I waited, he said no more. He smiled and touched my cheek, and we left the room without another word. That was all he ever told me about his parents.
Despite his forbidding silence, living with my grandfather finally allowed me to put words to the fears and nightmares from which I had suffered for as long as I could remember. His vast library taught me many things, including that I was part of a community of people coming to terms with a genocide. And if his library taught me the vocabulary and the history, he himself taught me to recognize the landscape in which the survivors of destruction live their lives, to see that minefield of guilt and sadness for what it was. Hints of the people and the world lost were everywhere, waiting to blow holes in his fragile hold on the present. Just as I vacuumed my crumbs and wiped up my water droplets, I did my best, for his sake and mine, not to disturb the minefield. Little did I know, he was still suffering from the fallout of a single explosion, the one that had originally blown him and my grandmother apart.
“You can come home,” my mother offered, when I relayed the details of this life to her over the phone. “Maybe you should come home.”
But I didn’t. I wanted to prove to myself that I could tough it out. My grandmother kept writing me encouraging letters about how much I was learning, how much character I was forging, and I didn’t want to disappoint her, either. But more than that, I felt that I was not finished, that there was something else for me to discover, though I didn’t know quite what.
And if President Chirac hadn’t dissolved the National Assembly that spring, perhaps I never would have found out.
One week in May 1997, my grandfather phoned the boardinghouse to say I should not come to his apartment that Friday night, that instead he would pick me up at seven a.m. sharp that Sunday, because he had to go vote in the early legislative elections. He didn’t explain further but promised to take me out for a celebratory dinner if the Left won a majority.
On the appointed day, I waited in the vestibule of the boardinghouse until his car rolled up the Chemin de Verey, turned around, and parked outside the gate. He disliked my housemistress intensely and refused to park on school property in case he ran into her. I got into the car, and we drove south in silence, over little highways that wiggled precariously through the mountains, on main streets through half-abandoned villages, on back roads past quiet factories with dark eyes shattered into their windowpanes, past geraniums and lace curtains and dingy cafés. My grandfather pointed out monuments to the Resistance along the way, sad gray stones tucked up onto the banks of the road, where bands of men had been denounced, discovered, shot down. Entire villages, he told me, had been massacred because they wouldn’t surrender their resistance fighters. Women and children had been burned alive because they would not speak. As I listened, I thought of all the times my grandmother complained to me that Americans had no sense of history. Now I understood that she meant Americans had no sense of her history, of our history. Here the past was everywhere, an entire continent sown with memories. For the first time, I wondered if she had sent me back so I could learn what it was like to live in that punishing landscape. I cracked open the window a tiny bit; I felt suffocated. The wind pierced the silence inside the car, whose pneumatic suspension system I imagined pumping more air into itself to hold the weight of those stories. I wondered what life would be like without that load to carry.
Then my grandfather rolled his window down, too, and we left the back roads for the highway. For ten minutes we went delightfully fast, and suddenly everything felt lighter again. Without slowing down until he was well into the curve and pulling up hard against the tollbooth, my grandfather exited the highway, and there we were in the suddenly hotter, yellower, greener South of France.
Over the centuries many people have written about this warm and wonderful region, the dark trees on the pebbly hillsides, the sassy tango of pink flowers peeping out from behind the oleander’s bottle-green fingers, the villages made of stones the color of honey. At fifteen, however, I had not read a single one of these accounts and was unprepared for all that beauty.
Even as we crossed the river and sped through the gray town of Le Teil, which looked as if it had seen better days, I was intoxicated. The road began to snake up the side of a mountain, which dropped away to reveal precariously perched farms and garden beds, and clotheslines dangling pants and bedsheets at unexpected angles into the ravine below. Up and up, around a big bend, past stone farmhouses, an abandoned filling station, an elderly mammoth hulk of a factory, an abandoned train station, an abandoned hotel, and then grapevines, stripes and stripes of them, marching away toward the hillsides. Ahead of us and to the left, beyond the vineyards, I saw a castle, of the fairy-tale kind, with one half of its quatrefoil shape fallen to ruin. That was Alba, though I didn’t know it yet.
Aerial view of Alba with the mairie (town hall) in the foreground and the castle in the background, circa 1960.
We turned left with the regiments of vines, which seemed to march beside us along a flat stretch of road, and then I really saw the village, draped over its little hill like a somnolent moth with drowsy terra-cotta wings speckled in mushroom gray, crowned by that mournful, fanciful castle.
We arrived just after noon on a wide main street, parked beneath the plane trees, and emerged into the heat of the May afternoon. “Stay here,” my grandfather instructed, and went inside the town hall to vote.
I sat in the car with the door open, my legs sticking out the side, and watched the town. Sometimes, even now, when I walk through Alba, I try to reason out just what it was that made me fall in love with the place. It was not the first intact medieval village I had ever seen, nor even the most beautiful. The stones in its walls were dark and ungainly, shaped by time and the river and placed every which way. The little church was austere and uninteresting. The buildings had little to nothing in the way of embellishment. No particular effort had been made to charm the outside world: no window boxes, no awnings, no brightly colored shutters. There were no endearing establishments selling snacks or souvenirs, just the necessities: pharmacy, grocery, tobacconist, bakery, bar. Alba’s attraction seemed deeply private, homey and homemade, beautiful for itself, not for passersby.