Alex's Wake (37 page)

We return silently to the car and I drive her back to her Renault. I thank her profusely for her time, her information, her empathy, and her kindness, and I ask if I may continue to stay in touch via e-mail. She assures me that my inquiries will always be welcome. We shake hands, possibly mutually embarrassed by our two hugs, and she drives off. I wave, stand still for a long minute, then climb slowly into the Meriva and head back along the treacherous road to Barracks 21.

I stand before what remains of the front entrance. I am alone, with only the wind for company as it sighs heavily, ruffling my hair and growing goose bumps along my arms. I close my eyes, trying my utmost to imagine this blasted heath as it was seventy years ago, when eight or nine thousand souls were crowded together in forced “accommodation,” living on limited rations of nourishment and hope. My imagination fails.

I step up into the space bounded by what remains of 21's walls and discover that my legs no longer have the strength to support me. I collapse in a corner amid the rubble and find myself speaking aloud to Alex and Helmut. I tell them over and over how sorry I am for them, sorry for the cold and the heat and the wind and the rain and the hunger and thirst and the anxiety and the loneliness and the boredom and the fear and the frustration and the stink and the flies and the sickness and the sadness. I tell them how happy I am that they had each other. I tell them how I wish I could have saved them. I tell them how glad I am that I came all this way to see for myself, and how determined I am to tell their story. And I tell them that I miss them, that I miss them, oh God, that I miss them.

And then I can tell them no more, as I sit crumpled in my little corner, crying like a lost child.

Presently I compose myself, pocket a shard of ceiling as a souvenir, and, before I take my leave of this abandoned place, take out a blue ballpoint pen to scratch a graffito on what is left of a wall. “For Alex and Helmut Goldschmidt,” I write, “who lived in this barracks from Jan to June 1941. I will never forget.”

11

Les Milles

S
UNDAY
,
JUNE
5, 2011. I must have known. Earlier in the year, as winter melted into spring and my plans for this journey coalesced into something solid, the thought must have taken root in my subconscious that eventually I would need to set aside my concerns for Alex and Helmut for a while, lest the burden become unbearable. As it happens, my highly solicitous subconscious advised my practical conscious mind to schedule three days in warm, painter-friendly Provence following our visit to Rivesaltes, days to be spent in self-indulgent relaxation amid the sunny surroundings that inspired the likes of Cezanne and Van Gogh, Daudet and Bizet. So on some level, I must have had an inkling of how shaken I would be on the last day of May. How I knew, I have no idea. But I accept the gift with joy.

Though I had made reservations in Provence for Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights, I left Wednesday, June 1, open, again anticipating that events in Rivesaltes might dictate how we would spend that day. My shaken state of mind upon my arrival back at our tannery hotel in Prades after my short stretch in Barracks 21 moves Amy to declare Wednesday a day solely of pleasure and exploration. So in the morning, we decide to visit Spain, neither of us ever having been there before. We drive the thirty-five miles up a winding mountain road, curling through the green and rocky Pyrenees, until we reach the frontier, which, on this clear and sunny noon, affords us an unobstructed view deep into the
storied land of Cervantes, Goya, Albeniz, Velasquez, Lorca, Segovia, Picasso, Domingo, and so many more celebrated writers, artists, and musicians. Using our best high-school Spanish, we order lunch at a restaurant just inside the border in Puigcerdà, a town that has occupied this mountain top for more than eight hundred years.

That evening, after floating down the switchbacks back to Prades, we drive to the tiny village of Eus, which clings to the sides of a steep hill partially visible from our tannery. Crowned by a church dedicated to Saint Vincent, Eus exhibits an enchanting mixture of cobblestoned present and ancient past. The ruins of a medieval castle lend their ancient stones to form some of the church's walls and the walls of several adjacent private homes. On this crystal-clear evening, as the sun sets over the mountains, forming long shadows from the crumbling castle turrets, we wonder whether another sort of enchantment has been cast: we meet almost no other human beings and yet encounter literally dozens of cats as they stroll and take their leisure in the winding lanes and on narrow walls, stone staircases, tiled roofs, and enclosed patios. Perhaps, we whisper to each other, “Eus” is Catalan or Occitan for “meow.” Just to be safe, we order fish for dinner.

Thursday dawns cloudy. On our way back east and north, we pay a final visit to the desolation of Camp Rivesaltes, enabling me to show Amy the site of Barracks 21 and some of the other sad landmarks I learned about from Elodie. Neither of us has any desire to linger, so well before noon we are back on the wide expanse of the A9, retracing our route from the previous Sunday. This time, however, we drive past Béziers and Montpellier, not leaving the expressway until just the other side of Nîmes, where we catch a two lane road heading east into the heart of the legendary region of Provence.

Whole books have been written about Provence, its history, cuisine, natural beauty, and the writers, poets, and painters who have lived and been inspired there. It comprises a little more than twelve thousand square miles, making it roughly the size of our home state of Maryland, although its shape is decidedly more regular than the salamander oddity of “The Old Line State.” Provence was home to some of the earliest human life forms on earth; primitive stone tools from 1 million BC
have been discovered on the Provençal coast. Nature-loving Celts from the Iron Age, believers in sacred woods and healing springs, took up residence in Provence, trading honey and cheese with their neighbors to the north. The great tides of civilization from Greece and Rome washed ashore in Provence, leaving behind as they receded the great city of Massalia—known to modernity as Marseille—as well as forums, arenas, and aqueducts that survive to dazzle us today. The medieval leaders of the Catholic Church so favored the land and climate of Provence that for more than one hundred years in the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, ten popes lived and ruled in Avignon. Provence was fought over and changed hands many times over the course of centuries, until it finally became a permanent part of France in 1481, following the death of the last Provençal ruler, Good King René, a patron and avid supporter of painters, troubadours, and tournaments.

Good King René's influence has persisted through the subsequent centuries, as artists of all stripes have flocked to Provence to paint, write, compose, and cook. Colette, Alphonse Daudet, Edith Wharton, and F. Scott Fitzgerald have written there; Georges Bizet, Charles Gounod, and Darius Milhaud have composed there. The list of painters who have set up their easels in Provence only starts with Van Gogh, Cezanne, Renoir, Monet, Matisse, Georges Braque, and Edvard Munch. And no mention of the pleasures of Provence would be complete without a gastronomic catalog including such native delights as bouillabaisse, ratatouille, the Thirteen Desserts, and the region's locally produced olives, olive oil, honey, cheese, peaches, berries, melons, and wine.

All this and Mediterranean sunshine, too, as I have been telling Amy for days, based in equal parts on research, general hearsay, and the personal testimony of my parents. My mother loved the sun. I recall her many enthusiastic tales of the times she and my father stayed in the town of Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, basking under what seemed, from her stories, to be permanently sunny skies. So I have booked three nights at a former grand château—now a hotel—just outside Saint-Rémy, anticipating abundant sunshine.

For all three days, it rarely stops raining.

However, we are not disappointed. The château's rooms and its restaurant are luxurious, restful, and deeply satisfying, particularly after the stress and sadness of Rivesaltes. We take long naps and walk the grounds of the château. We spend much of Friday exploring Saint-Rémy, renowned as the birthplace of Nostradamus and the residence, for one prolific year, of Vincent van Gogh. While committed—by choice—to the asylum of St. Paul Hospital for twelve months beginning in May 1889, Vincent produced an astonishing one hundred forty-two paintings, including portraits of his cramped but cozy bedroom at the asylum, studies of the wheat fields and olive trees he could see from his window, and
Starry Night
, lit by his own inner fire. We peer upward during our stormy nights in Saint-Rémy, hoping in vain to catch a glimpse of his vision, but we are delighted to see the descendants of the very olive trees Vincent painted, their grey-green branches tossing in the gentle wind and rain of a soft afternoon. On Friday evening, in a Saint-Rémy
brasserie
, we witness seven Provençal cardsharps gathered around a green velvet-topped table, playing an enthusiastic game of poker, a scene Vincent would have loved.

Saturday morning offers a few breaks in the clouds, so we take a scenic spin along some picturesque back roads of Provence, venturing far enough east to catch a glimpse of Mont Sainte-Victoire, the mountain Paul Cezanne captured on canvas dozens of times. By noon we are back in the Alpilles mountain range near Saint-Rémy and rain has begun falling again. Not daunted, however, we drive into the village of Maussane-les-Alpilles, find a
boulangerie
and a
fromagerie
, and enjoy a romantic repast of fresh bread and cheese huddled on the steps under the stone awning of the village church. The pain, sorrow, and endless frustrations of 1941 seem long ago and far, far away.

But Sunday morning, announcing itself with the tuneful tolling of church bells from Saint-Rémy, heralds the end of our Provençal idyll and the resumption of our grim pursuit. Luckily, we do not have far to travel today, so we linger at breakfast and take our time leaving the château. It is noon when we finally drive away from Saint-Rémy, heading east on the D99. We enjoy the rural charms of Provence for another hour or so before we rejoin the faster pace of the everyday world
and speed south and east, catching another autoroute in its rush toward Aix-en-Provence, the medieval capital of the region. Our route spins us south on a bypass, and from there we drive into the small, largely unattractive town of Les Milles. We struggle to make sense of our directions and eventually find our lodgings for the next two nights, a lovely little B&B called La Gracette, presided over by our more than gracious hosts, Dana and Raphaelle. As they usher us up to our room, which opens into a round, turret-shaped bathroom, we learn a bit about pigeons and class divisions.

In medieval days, pigeons were so highly prized that only the nobility were allowed to keep them. Many a grand château boasted a separate structure, its distinctive circular shape announcing to all who beheld it that here was a dovecote, or pigeon house, a special home for those highly valued birds that only the wellborn could possess. When the revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries tore down some of the walls separating the upper and lower classes, one of the first perquisites claimed by the new bourgeois was the right to keep pigeons. Many homes built in the following decades proudly included a rounded wing or tower to declare the owner upwardly mobile enough to possess pigeons, whether or not birds actually lived there. Our round bathroom is proof that the original owners of La Gracette had made the grade.

As evening approaches, mindful of our appointment tomorrow morning and of last Monday morning's confusion, I am determined to learn the exact location of Camp des Milles. With Raphaelle's detailed directions to guide us, in only ten minutes we are looking over a barred gate at the outlines of an immense factory, the site of the former camp. Satisfied that we'll be able to find our way back in the morning, we look for a place to have dinner. Nothing is open in the little town on this Sunday evening, so we drive toward the outskirts of Aix, confident that we'll find something. But perhaps this corner of France is subject to blue laws of which we have no knowledge; not a single open restaurant do we find. Finally, faint with hunger, we admit defeat and dine on Big Macs and fries at a McDonald's. Sacrilege though it seems at the time to consume fast food in France, we devour our dinner with relish,
as well as ketchup and mustard: little packets of savory Dijon mustard at that. Far from home, we offer up silent thanks for good old American standardization.

Back at La Gracette, we speak briefly with Dana and Raphaelle, telling them about my unhappy connection with their town. They listen quietly and respectfully, their faces reflecting sincere sympathy. But I find myself soon growing weary of Raphaelle's story of her mother's utter ignorance of what went on at the factory by the railroad tracks. Fearing that I might begin to ask pointed questions I will come to regret, we make our excuses and retire upstairs to our little bedroom adjoining the pigeon house. Soon enough, I know, we will again be transported from our comfortable present into the painful past.

D
ECADES BEFORE CEZANNE
, Van Gogh, and their fellow painters made their pilgrimages to Provence, the factory in Les Milles produced bricks and the distinctive terra-cotta tiles that adorn the roofs of many Provençal houses. But the factory had fallen into disuse by the late summer of 1939, its 160,000-square-foot, four-story structure sitting silently within its dusty seventeen-acre grounds. Within a fortnight of the beginning of the war in early September, the facilities returned to life as an internment camp for thousands of “undesirable foreigners,” mostly German and Austrian refugees fleeing from the plague of Hitlerism that had infected their homelands, but also exiles from other countries who lacked the proper transit papers for legal immigration, a number of political dissidents, and former members of the International Brigades who had fought on the Republican side during the Spanish Civil War. Having come to France seeking respite from persecution in their home countries, these mostly Jewish fugitives found themselves ensnared once again.