So that’s what Grandma had to say, sixty years later, about her husband, their relationship, the fault lines in her marriage: Grandpa was brilliant, but he was cruel, and he didn’t—he couldn’t—love her. Her letter ended, “Don’t forget my memories from so long ago had been most likely modified by time and events.… I keep thinking much about you and wishing, that whatever happens, together you’ll make it as you have each other to sustain you.”
Untangling the thread of my grandmother’s memory, I saw there must have been a kind of honeymoon period in the four months she and my grandfather spent at Madame Berchtold’s. My grandmother’s illness, the newness of their being together, the fact that they “hardly saw each other,” all would have limited my grandfather’s inborn peevishness; what’s more, given the level of irritability common in both their families, my grandmother likely would have taken an occasional volley of cranky, nasty insults in stride. I knew my grandfather dealt with stress and pain by being mean. The closer he was to you, the freer he became with his hypercritical nastiness. If he had loved her, if he was intimate with her, I only can imagine how horridly he must have treated her—but in a way to which she sadly must have been accustomed, and which would have been mitigated by the good news of the end of the war, my grandmother’s pregnancy, and my grandfather’s new job.
Probably Armand’s first passport photos, taken in Paris in 1946 after the French legal team at the Nuremberg Trials helped him obtain French citizenship.
The more I considered it, the more certain I became that the rupture must have happened later. I recalled my grandmother telling me that in 1948, when she took her parents on the train to Marseille and bought the house in Alba on the way back, she broke down and confessed to her mother how bad things were. Between my grandfather’s departure from Geneva in 1945 and that train ride in 1948, one major event had occurred: Nuremberg.
After the Trials, the hardness set in. For how could Armand possibly have described to her the chemical tinge of the lights, the rustle and thud of papers and binders being distributed, the high-pitched clatter of the steno typists returning to their machines, sounds that seemed to suck all possibility of the outside world from the big brown room? How could he have told her of the cold sweat that must have gripped him when Fritzsche or Speer nodded hello to the interpreters as they filed in? How could he have conveyed how he fidgeted off his drowsiness when it was not his turn to work, turned his attention to the people in one corner of the courtroom and then another, stared at the men sitting and listening to the charges against them, fought off waves of boredom, anger, hostility, grief, exhaustion, disbelief, then coiled himself awake, into the tensest, densest kind of listening, when it was his turn to work? The interpreters had little recall of the words they rattled off all day long, but nearly all of them complained of nightmares.
And every so often, like a diver surfacing for air, Armand would notice the words he and his colleagues were saying and feel a wave of understanding splash over him. And then the torrent of words would rush forward again, and he would forget the phrase and lose track of the meaning. The words seemed to roll off him. As they came out of his mouth, he learned the crimes committed against his family. And then his mind closed back around them, and nothing ever looked the same again. Who could wear a wedding band after learning of the stacks of them stripped off perished fingers? Who could read by the light cast through a lampshade? Coats, hats, children’s toys—everything had been marked, stained, destroyed. My grandfather’s personality could not withstand it. He hardened around that knowledge, and his hardness cut my grandmother to the quick.
The enormity of my grandfather’s silence, I realized, was commensurate with the enormity of the knowledge he carried away from Nuremberg. He did not know how to live in a world where love and that existed. And my grandmother, whose zest and ingenuity had carried them both so far—my grandmother did. And because she was able to continue loving, she left. I thought of the courage it must have taken to break her bond with that terrible weight of sadness and bitterness, a weight the whole world believed she ought to bear with Armand, and go live her life. She could love a man with whom she had been through so much, but she could not let him drag her down into an existence devoted to remembering. Anna was brave enough to move forward, even if it meant leaving the one person who connected her to her past.
But she’d never fully abandoned him. All the ways she nudged me back to him over the years, starting with sending me to boarding school in Geneva when I was a teenager, were, I believe, her final attempts to save him, to show him how to love again. And in the process, she saved me. She’d refused to let the weight of our sad past pull me under; recognizing my childhood fears, my frequent illness, my sense of displacement, she had pushed me away, pushed me to the house in La Roche, pushed me to be alive. Unlike her, I was lucky enough to be young in a time where I could live and love as I wished. While I was trying to remember, Grandma was urging me to forget, to put it down on paper and get on with the labor of living.
By the time I finished reconstructing and recording my grandparents’ story, my grandfather was too senile to read it, but I had grown up enough not to regret that: I’m sure it would have taken him about a paragraph to fly into a rage and never speak to me again.
But as I had dreamed, my grandmother did read it, all the way through, at the age of ninety-seven. I was nearly five months pregnant, and I had flown back to the States to visit her for what we both knew would be the last time. “I loved it,” she told me. “I’m glad you got it all written down.”
“But did I get it right?” I asked. “I can’t have. It must be full of mistakes. What should I change?”
She sighed and leaned back on her pillows. “Mirandali, it’s so long ago now. Who can remember?”
I stretched out next to her in the bed, and she scooted over to make room for me. We lay there spooned up against each other, and I tried to soak up all I could of her, so that the little baby I was carrying could get a whiff of that indomitable zest for life, that ineffable perfume of contradictions. I hoped she couldn’t see the tears squeezing out of my eyes because I knew she wouldn’t approve of them.
“You know I don’t want you to come to my funeral,” Grandma said, into the silence.
“Oh, Grandma, I can’t promise you that.”
“You’ll be too pregnant, anyway,” she predicted. “That’s good. You know I’ll be right here.” She tapped herself on the chest and head.
I changed the subject. “Do you know, I was at a party with Julien’s tante Chantal, she’s about your age, a little younger—I think you’d like her so much.”