I met George through Pierrette, a Castelfranc woman of very ripe years, who found herself in the hospital a few years ago, gravely ill, without any friends or family to visit. Once recovered, she made a vow to take a little time each week to visit with a few people in Les Floralies, a "senior residence" home in Prayssac, She took Mrs Snoutsworthy along one week and she suggested I go talk with George, one of those on Pierrette's list, about the war.
George though almost 90 is completely cogent and has a formidable memory. I'm a complete sucker for war stories but George's seemed the more credible for their lack of gripping drama. They seemed to be mostly about carrying messages around and blowing up bridges here and there. He knows the precise date of every incident, the names of comrades and officers. He is modestly proud--can you say that?--of his role which was without any heroics that he has cared to mention.
When I returned this year, George had been moved from Floralies to the local nursing home, Les Balcons du Lot. It really is a balcony, hanging over the 911, visible for miles around especially the construction cranes as they enlarge the place for the next round of geezers.
George got moved because he had bad bronchial congestion all winter and is still overwhelmed from time to time with horrible profoundd phlegm-seeking fits of coughing, like the roaring of a bear. He continues whatever sentence was interrupted as if there had been no roaring, no bear.
I asked him about the photos up on his wall. Here is his first wife.
Between George's mumbling, my increasing deafness, and my parlous French, I'm sure to get a lot of details wrong but in my version, it is one of the saddest stories I know. This beautiful young woman, Ingrid, was a Jew brought up in Berlin by her grandmother after her parents were taken away by the Nazis. The grandmother's house was blown up by Allied bombing, so the grandmother, a non-Jew, obliged to apply for new identity papers, gave Ingrid her family name. George met and married Ingrid just after the end of the war in Germany where he found himself working for a lumber importer in the Black Forest. From dealing with tropical wood, he came down with malaria, a bad enough case that he was evacuated to Prayssac where a pharmacist uncle was able to get the latest medicine amidst postwar medical shortages. When George returned to consciousness months later, there was no word from Ingrid answering his many letters to her. I imagine people lost touch with one another in the wake of that cataclysmic war but there was something more: a woman who worked in the Prayssac post office happened to be in love with George and she intercepted his letters to Ingrid and her letters back to him. He later discovered that Ingrid had been pregnant and had died in childbirth along with the baby.
George remarried much later and had three or four children with this second wife before divorcing her. He doesn't care to speak about her and there are large holes in his photo album where he has torn out pictures of her. Nor does he have much to say about their children who he says have not been in touch with him for decades. Trying to get him to say more about the brouille I once asked him to describe the children: "They each had one head, two arms, two legs."
He had other women in his life and was close with an aunt who is still alive and kicking. But his greatest love seems to have been for his mother, pictured below in her role as Carmen.
He lived with her for the last 8 years of her life up in Limoges.
