Dramatic as that poem sounded, it would be inaccurate to say I was astounded by the discovery of my grandparents’ marriage, divorce, and ensuing silence. Startled, yes, but at the same time, I’d grown up in a universe that revolved around an unspoken maxim: everything can fall apart.
As a child, I did not discern this principle ordering my life, though by the time I learned about my grandparents, I had begun to feel the contours of its presence. I knew it somehow related to my keeping my shoes by the door and thinking constantly about viable places to hide; to our always having candles and matches at hand; to my mother snapping off the radio or rattling the newspaper shut at the mention of certain things; and to my non-Jewish father remarking from time to time when I visited him and my stepmother, “This will all come down to you, Miranda. You’re going to have to figure out how to carry it all.”
But I digress in mentioning these phenomena, which I never thought to associate with my grandmother, not back then. I bring up this maxim only to say that in a world that revolved around the possibility that everything might fall apart at any second, the disintegration of my grandparents’ marriage was neither surprising nor spectacular.
Certainly, my grandmother didn’t treat her relationship with my grandfather—or lack thereof—as if it were anything special. If she deigned to talk about him at all, it was only very briefly, and then she’d veer off onto another topic entirely—obesity in household pets, or her thoughts on the U.S. Postal Service. I still remember the first time I tried to bring up the subject with her, the summer after I turned thirteen. If becoming bat mitzvah had made me a woman, then it was time for me to learn to tell fortunes. “Always have at least one skill to fall back on—it could save your life. It saved mine.”
“How?”
“On my last journey home … I was taking a train full of traveling salesmen. They were eying me, and I pulled out my pack of cards. It kept them distracted all night.”
I was too young to really comprehend the threat she was hinting at, nor how the skill she was offering me might guard against it.
“I remember another time,” Grandma went on, “in my first year of residency, one of the other residents followed me back to my room, he invited himself in, and he kept moving closer and closer, so I pulled out my deck of cards and proposed a reading! Of course he accepted. It was the strangest combination of cards—I forget what-all, about his family, trouble with an inheritance, a lawyer, or I don’t know what. He got quieter and quieter, and then he just left. Now pay attention, closely-closely, because I can’t teach you. You have to steal it from me.”
She pulled out a deck of miniature playing cards, with a pink and red Art Nouveau pattern on the back. Half of them were like new, their gilt edges still shiny. The other half, from the sevens up, were battered and worn. “These were your mother’s cards. She foretold a bad fortune and got spooked and gave them back to me. Once you learn, you can have the ones my friend Cilli gave me before I took that last journey home. I used to eat at her house every day—she was a smart girl, at the top of our medical class, but then she had an affair with a doctor, a Romanian aristocrat, and got pregnant. He went home, he said he was going to sort of smooth the way with his family and then send for her, and she never heard from him again, except to send her the pension alimentaire. You know, the alimony—no, the child support. He was a nice little boy, the son, but she was so depressed. Always reading her own cards, which is bad luck, you know. Very bad luck. Never read your own cards.” She tapped them with her finger and commanded, “Cut them, twice now, with your left hand, toward your heart.”
Everyone in my family had some complaint about my grandmother’s incessant talking—“She’s not hard of hearing, she’s hard of listening,” my father once grumbled after a particularly long disquisition—and I was just old enough to have begun feeling embarrassed by it, by the way she jumped from topic to topic, by her extremely spotty sense of tact, by her refusal to pronounce her w’s correctly. But I still hung on her every word as she zigzagged from one memory to another.
For hours we counted out the cards together, my grandmother reading and me observing until I had memorized the different steps and layouts and begun to grasp the cards’ many meanings. “Very good,” she said. “You have to keep practicing, though. So you should have something to fall back on,” she repeated. “In case you need money, or what—you never know.”
She swept the cards off the table and shuffled. “Cilli, I don’t know what happened to her. I think she became a collabo.” I didn’t know what shocked me more, the story ending that way, or my grandmother’s casual use of that terrible word. Now I also wonder how I could already have been familiar with the term—and its implications—at such a young age.
It suddenly occurred to me that my grandmother might have known my grandfather then, so I ventured, “What about Grandpa? Did he know Cilli?”
“He met her, Cilli. But he didn’t like her. Maybe he’s the one who told me she was a collabo.”
“Did you tell his fortune?”
She laughed. “He never wanted me to. He said it was superstitious, or it made him nervous, or what—he never let me.”
“Were you together then?”
“Together … well, you know, I knew his sister, Rosie, and his mother—can you imagine Rosie had never washed her own hair until she got married? I ask you. The only girl of the family. Your grandfather was the baby. Do you know what he told me when we first met? He said he hated his father. Could you imagine, hating your father? I couldn’t believe it. Hating your father. He wouldn’t even say goodbye to him when they were evacuated. Never saw him again. But he was brilliant. Everyone said so. I was taught to admire brilliance.”
I tried to sift through all of the information tumbling at me, but Grandma was already in Samarkand, or maybe Australia, stressing the importance of “just talking to people,” a skill she claimed my grandfather did not have. “He never could get comfortable. Me, I always just got on a bus and there I was. Like in Russia, in the sixties, visiting the insane asylums.” She made air quotes around those last two words and chuckled. “Boy, did they get mad about that.” Vainly, I tried to steer her off the bus and back toward my grandfather, but she’d already flitted away on another tangent. “I’ve even been to see the—oh, what is it called—the fancy Hitler vacation house.”
I abandoned my efforts and blinked. “The Hitler vacation house?”
“You know, where he went on holidays. Famous! Big gardens, paintings, sculptures … it’s on a lake … what’s the name … Berghof? Berchtesgaden? The Adlersnest? You know what I’m talking about. Ah ha!” This last comment was directed at the cards. “See, travel!” She pointed at the nine of diamonds. “And family.” She tapped the ten of hearts.