Lessons from africa

Didn’t Mémé tell me stories of marriage deals gone sour over a cup of coffee?

I couldn’t remember it all, but I knew for sure that a good Armenian wife always served her coffee topped with thick brown foam.

Which totally ruled out Armenian marriage for me.

Maman got up, set pretty porcelain cups on the table, wide open corollas and their matching saucers, delicate, decorated on the outside with intricate Chinese scenes, long-robed ladies carrying painted umbrellas. ‘Clink,’ rang the cups, five, seven, ‘clink, clink,’ nine, twelve... Who’s coming?

Mémé turned off the gas, brought her djezve to the table, filled to the brim with her steaming Armenian café.

Crowned to perfection with creamy brown froth.

The doorbell rang, steps ran in the hallway, the kitchen door opened in a jolt. First the children rushed in, then their parents walked in. All red-cheeked from the cold, they smelled good of fresh snow. Within fifteen minutes, my grandparents’ kitchen was invaded. I surrendered the sink and retreated back to my seat. In the general confusion, chairs and dessert plates appeared, more sarlborlma was passed around, more café poured.

Full of enchanted aroma.

Voices hushed, Mémé sat down, sipped on her café. One by one, my aunts finished drinking theirs, placed their empty cups upside down on the saucers. Who would start? Eyebrows raised in question marks, they looked at each other, waited for their turn on the fortune-telling wheel. For Mémé Vartanouch could read the mysterious patterns in the coffee grounds.

Magical, my grandmother’s brew was the milk of storytelling.

If the women told their fortune in a cup, the men sat back and reminisced old wartime stories. My father liked to remind everyone of how he used to stand in line all day, at ten years old, when Mémé worked at the plant and Pépé fought on the frontlines in World War II, only to bring back home a rationed piece of bread. “At ten years old,” Papa insisted, “can you imagine? Dix ans.”

At ten years old, my brother’s age exactly. But worlds apart: Philippe was safely playing by the sofa with his Christmas toys.

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A couple of hours after lunch, my grandparents’ kitchen had been turned into an open dance floor, with the lights turned on and music playing on the turn-table. We just listened to Charles Aznavour, whom we casually referred to in my family as Le Cousin, not so much because ‘The Cousin’ was Armenian – his real name was Aznavourian – but mostly because Papa bought his black Citroën car from him.

Next would come Nana Mouskouri, George Moustaki and of course, the Sirtaki dance song from Zorba the Greek. With Anthony Quinn bursting on screen, that film had become a big event in my family. The film might be American, and Greek the music and the island, yet, they told a story without borders or boundaries.

The story of human spirit, undefeated by misfortune, vibrant with insatiable lust for life. Not unlike the story of a country, robbed of its territory.

2011 Memoirs Contest, Honorable Mention

“Rita, The Search”

by Patricia Fitzgerald, Rock Hill, SC

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I spotted Nounou’s large plaster house in Surgères from the piece of red, flowered Tahitian pareau cloth hanging in front. She knotted the cotton fabric and hung it from the green-shuttered, second floor window, letting us know that in the middle of this small, medieval town in southwestern France lived a woman from the South Pacific.

This visit, attached to a hiking trip with my husband, was the fun part of tracking down the background of my Tahitian-born Mother to a cousin by marriage, Nounou Martin.

Nounou sat in her front doorway an hour that day, awaiting the daughter of her American cousin who got lost misreading the map. But the hugs and kisses were just as warm when we finally arrived to meet my ninety-one-year-old Mother’s ninety-one -year-old cousin. For years Nounou’s raspy voice was at the other end of the phone in France, a lonely widow calling South Carolina at all hours, oblivious to the time difference. She and Mother, schoolmates at the Protestant Vienot Girls’ School in Papeete, Tahiti in the 1920s, went opposite directions after graduation in 1928. Continents apart for about thirty-five years, they reconnected through a cousin, and spent decades sharing life through letters, phone calls and two visits from Mother. To them, she told me, it felt like they’d never been separated.

In the phone calls, Nounou couldn’t understood why Rita, my mother, didn’t just hop a plane in America for the “short flight” to Paris, where her daughter Madeleine would pick her up for the four-hour train ride to Surgères. Then the two senior citizens could speak French to their hearts’ content, basking in the joy of being together as they had at school.

I had heard about Nounou for years, their studying together in Tahiti, her French

Colonial life in Cambodia, her husband Claude’s agony as a Japanese prisoner of war in Hanoi, his survey work on the Chunnel. Claude had died ten years before, so now she lived alone in this big house. The presence of my husband and me would be cathartic.

Twice, when Mother still could travel overseas, she visited Nounou in the French farmhouse. When they reconnected in person, the conversation never skipped a beat.

“Ah, Rita (accent on ‘a’), I am six months older than you, so I was smarter than you in class,” Nounou gleefully chided at their first meeting. “I won the academic award.”

“Yes, you were first, but I was SECOND and prettier,” scoffed Rita with a wink, recalling their teen years at school.

“Remember us walking to our Vienot junior high school together? “ recalled Mother.

Nounou lived near the hospital with her English grandmother, Louisa. Sometimes Nounou, “Noute” to her family, wouldn’t be ready when Mother arrived, and she would watch Granny Louisa finish the hair braiding. Noute sat on a stool, eager to get to class, while Louisa used her middle finger to pull a small hunk of blond strands from beside her granddaughter’s face and weave it in. Then came another hunk and another, until she completed the long, thick, French braid that hung down Noute’s back and flapped as they ran to school.

Over and over again, Mother regaled us with stories of that first visit in 1962.

“I walked with Nounou’s husband, Claude, through his garden,” she said, as he identified beans and sorrel and apples that would appear on the lunch table. That image led to Mother’s fondest of all Nounou recollections.

“No one got up quickly from the table,” she recalled. The parents and children stayed for hours, sharing their opinions on books and movies, history and politics. “Those were such stimulating discussions. I loved it.”
She preferred this to American dinner tables, where children were up at the last bite, eager to join their friends outside.

After her two visits to Surgères, a dairy town just a half hour from the Atlantic, still glorious with sixteenth century ramparts, city gate and an old castle, Mother wanted her family to connect with her childhood buddy.

“If you’re going to France, you have to meet Nounou,” Mother had said, wishing she were coming along. So we hiked the Dordogne River Valley for Mother, calling her daily to describe the patés, the wine, the countryside we hiked. Of course we’d see Nounou.

During an earlier trip to Paris, on Mother’s insistence, we had met Madeleine, Nounou’s daughter who was a hospital nurse in the City of Light. In broken English she gave us pieces of the amazing love stories and shipboard globe-hopping of Nounou’s mother and grandmother, from Tahiti to Paris, Cambodia and back.

These stories were fascinating as she described this 1920s and 1930s’ era of steamship travel and vagabond life. The trips that Nounou and her parents made when sailing from Marseilles to Cambodia took weeks through an area of the world’s ancient history. They started in Marseilles, Madeleine told us, crossed the Mediterranean to the Suez Canal, down the Red Sea to Djibouti, then to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and Singapore, finally arriving in Saigon. To someone who grew up in one town, one state and thought summer camp was a satisfying vacation, this drama opened to me a new world vision. I wanted the full story of this adventuresome cousin and wondered what new information we could discover.

As the years ticked away, I worried that we might not make it to France in time. Fortunately, like Mother, Nounou came from strong, European stock and actually was more agile than Mother.

Meeting Nounou that afternoon was like facing an icon. Countless times I had stared at her photo on Mother’s shelf, which had been shot at a three-quarter angle. The white hair intrigued me, the coquettish grin, diminutive, well-formed nose that came to a point, as well. In person, this woman had flair. Her eyes were even more impish than the photos portrayed and she seemed to wink at us when she said something humorous. Unlike Mother, to whom we often had to explain jokes, Nounou laughed right off, even when we were speaking in two different tongues.

For this meeting, Madeleine came from Paris with her husband, François, to greet and host us. They invited Christiane, an English teacher and friend from Cambodian days, to translate. Madeleine poured champagne and passed paté as Nounou cried and grinned, overcome at the arrival of a cousin -- Rita’s daughter, no less -- to her solitary life. She immediately called Rita, yelling into the phone, “They’re here, they’re here.”

Then, when offered champagne, she quipped “Why not? I don’t eat much, but I like champagne and chocolate,” favorites just like Mother.

The family and Christiane toured us through the large garden where a lawn had grown over the vegetables tended by Nounou’s late husband, Claude. Truly, this courtyard garden reflected the personality, the love of beauty of its family. Fruit trees were laden with figs, apples and peaches; deep pink roses climbed the green shutters; brick walls delineated sections of the garden, and crepe myrtles bloomed to their heart’s content. Under the fig tree, my husband and Madeleine’s husband communicated for five minutes in nothing but laughter and sign language. They had gotten to know one another!

I turned back to the white, French farmhouse with its green shutters and rose bushes and noticed the setting felt like a mini Monet’s house in Giverny.

“Why not,” said Note, plucking a cherry tomato. “I feel famous.” She reached for lemons on a short tree, something she does daily, reflecting how much she loved the abundant garden Claude left her.

Nounou’s children had tried to move her nearer to them, but she steadfastly refused to leave the comfortable family home she had chosen on her own. The furniture and art represented her life around the world: a large brown and white tapa cloth from Polynesia on the stairwell, Oriental chests from Cambodia in the hall and hand-carved, floor to ceiling French armoires in each bedroom.

We felt like French royalty, being hosted in such grandeur.

I felt right at home as I touched the tapa cloth, bumpy from pounding its shape, and saw Tahitian shell necklaces spread on tables, just like mine and Mother’s in South Carolina. This was going to be an emotional visit.

While Nounou conversed over François’ ox tail soup, I wondered, is she Tahitian or French? Her skin looked English, fair like Mother’s, but still blotched like Mother’s from the Tahiti sun. We learned bits and pieces of the French Colonial life, the same that my French-Tahitian grandfather lived in Papeete. Henri Vidal, Mother’s father, was a court recorder for the French Colonial government.

Nounou’s mother, Eugenie, lived with her English mother, Louisa, enjoying the enviable life of a Colonial in Tahiti. Noute’s father, Fritz Carl Schander, was a German who worked at Donald’s department store in downtown Papeete. When Noute was born in Papeete in 1913, Fritz did the honorable thing, heading for the City Hall to legitimize the baby girl with his name. Then he proposed marriage to Eugenie but took a detour, returning home to Germany before the wedding. Eugenie named her daughter Eva Ariell Olga Eteta Schander, honoring her heritage and Tahitian birthplace. The name eventually was shortened to Nounou, or Noute.

Eugenie and toddler Nounou sailed from Tahiti around the Horn to Paris for the nuptials, but meanwhile, World War I broke out. Fritz’s brother was killed. His parents were devastated and refused to let him marry a French woman, an enemy in their eyes. Luckily, she found refuge with her twin sister, Jeanne, who lived in Paris.

Mother had whispered to me that no one really knew who Noute’s father was, but it wasn’t discussed aloud at school. She was just accepted with the other students. Speculation undoubtedly made delicious fodder for Papeete’s “coconut wireless,” but as we looked at Nounou now, so full of life, so eager to connect with family, we dismissed it as unimportant.

As Nounou told the stories, mixing a patois of French and English in her raspy voice, she pulled out an album and flipped through black and white photos, turning pages carefully. There she was in Papeete, a young schoolgirl with skin so luminescent it appeared that a light shone from within her face. Another in Papeete showed Eugenie as an attractive and sought after belle of the ball. And yet another portrayed Nounou as a toddler with her mother, waving farewell at the Papeete dock as they sailed for the ill-fated nuptials. Little did they know where the smiles and big dreams were leading them. Young, French doctors often stopped for lunch at Louisa’s. I could imagine them hanging around the kitchen table, sipping café au lait and thoroughly enjoying this South Pacific duty that French doctors back home would kill for.

One suitor, Dr. Leon Guérard, upon hearing of the cancelled wedding, tracked Eugenie to Paris with courtship in mind. He must have won her affections, for in 1917 Eugenie and Leon were married in Paris. Nounou’s album featured a full-page formal photo of Leon in tails and Eugenie in full-length wedding gown with exquisite rose bouquet.

Nounou was four years old and already her life had changed.

Eugenie wanted a fresh start with her new husband, unsaddled by a child. She decided Nounou would be much happier living with her grandmother Louisa in Papeete, attending school. I wondered why Eugenie’s sister, Jeanne, didn’t raise Nounou, but decided that if she were as attractive as her sister, caring for a youngster was not tops on her list.

A minister friend and his wife, Pasteur and Madame Octave Moreau, who were returning to French Polynesia from France, agreed to take Nounou with them. So in about 1919, Noute recalls, when she was six years old, off she went for a very long adventure with the couple. Nounou remembers the arduous trip, starting with crossing the Atlantic to New York by ship.

“There was a dreadful storm,” she said. “I remember it vividly.”

They crossed America by train from New York to San Francisco, then boarded another ship to cross the Pacific to Tahiti.

Although she loved her grandmother, during the voyage, Nounou missed her mother and wondered why she couldn’t live with her mamy and her new step papa. That was impossible, Eugenie had told her daughter, because they soon were departing for medical duty in Tonkin, North Vietnam. The remote village where they would stay was not safe to raise a child, Eugenie told her daughter.

Nounou was crestfallen.

“I always felt rejection from my mother,” she told us, adding that a brother had arrived. “Everything was done for him.”

I felt sorry for her, knowing how fortunate I had been, living in a modest California home with the accepted fifties family: two parents, one sister and the routine of school, studying and family Sunday suppers. I thought about Nounou’s trip from France, across the United States and down to Tahiti. Even if I were escorted by a man of the cloth, I doubt I ever could have made such a challenging crossing without my mother.

Each night, as more of the fascinating story emerged over dinner – baked salmon wrapped in sorrel leaves from the garden, chicken terrine filled with fresh duck

paté - I ran for my notebook. We didn’t want to appear too curious, but we had only three days to unfold the exciting, complicated story. My husband and I began comparing notes, not wanting to miss a thing.

In the mornings, I helped with the daily farmhouse ritual of opening the heavy shutters. After fifty years of opening, closing and repainting, some would stick.

“Just hit them like this,” Nounou said, giving the shutter a bump with her hip. Her fitness astounded me. She also mounted the curving staircase every night for bed. Rita, my own mother, suffering from osteoporosis, never could have made such physical moves.

As the morning light poured in the windows, I felt the world of Nounou was opening the same way. We were detectives at work and I often sat at her feet, writing. Occasionally she drifted to sleep on her worn wicker chair by the window, forgetting the near-by phone that kept her in touch with Rita.

One day I looked around the living room, and saw that front and center on the white plaster wall hung an imposing photo of Nounou’s English great-grandmother, Frances Ann Wolseley Hills. Nounou pronounced each name carefully as she admired the striped taffeta dress falling over Frances Ann’s ample bosom.

With Christiane’s translation help, starting with Frances Ann, born in England in 1824, we began to track down Nounou’s ancestors. The intermarrying of French and English higher-ups was impossible to follow completely. Between London, the West Indies, New Zealand and Tahiti, an amazingly resilient and exciting family burst forth. The stories illustrated how much dallying occurred when the French and English found themselves in a warm, tropical place without the cultural encumbrances of their mother countries. I wondered what Mother would say, since she was straight-laced and left Tahiti in the first place because she didn’t like the French hanky-panky. In fact, when I took home Nounou’s complicated genealogical history, written in French, Mother translated it and said, “If that happened to me, you’d never get it out of me.”

What fascinated me about Nounou’s background was that none of her forbears married Tahitians, as my French, Danish, American and English great-great-grandfathers had. Perhaps it was more likely in Tahiti for a man to marry a local girl rather than for a woman to do the same. Nonetheless, Nounou was a white colonial in Tahiti, while Mother, despite her French ancestry, was mixed.

Frances Ann appeared once again in my life. On a return trip to Tahiti, I stayed with Cocotte Frogier, a cousin who I learned was related to Frances Ann. There, in Cocotte’s hall, hung the same elegant photo of Frances Ann Wolseley Hills. I was stunned. Not only that, Cocotte took me to the L’Uranie Cemetery in Papeete, and sure enough, France Ann’s life ended in 1894 in Tahiti and there she rests. The family connections are several times removed and someday I’ll have the energy to track them down.

Hopping to another black and white album, there was the family in 1920s Cambodia without Nounou, who studied back in Tahiti. There were Eugenie, her glamorous mother, who flirted with the camera, her stoic French step-papa, Leon Guerard, and numerous Cambodians who served their French Colonial family. The Cambodians resembled friends more than servants, dressed in the Asian style of shirt tied at the waist, holding together a cloth wrapped into a long skirt. The family, always in smart dress, strolled the beaches, played croquet on vast lawns and rode in open cars, chauffeurs at the wheel.

In France, these beautiful people would have been middle class, but serving the French in Southwest Asia in the 1920s and 1930s, they were top of the line.

There were cats and dogs too, and the occasional elephant.

“Did you ride an elephant?” I asked Nounou.

“Once,” she quipped, “but it wasn’t very comfortable.” Then she continued describing her stepfather.

“My step-papa was mean,” Nounou said matter-of-factly, remembering Tahiti, “and yelled a lot.” Mother had confirmed this, recalling a brusque Leon when he returned to Tahiti as the hospital director, waiting with Eugenie for Nounou to graduate from the Vienot School. “He was crabby and had a moustache and dark hair,” Mother said, ending with one of her favorite expressions, “a typical French snob.”

Perhaps their return to Tahiti when Nounou was a developing teenager, a condition he might not have anticipated, plus the anxiety of his next duty station in Cambodia, made him grumpy. Having only a son for several years, he was not used to coming home after a long absence to raise a daughter.

When Mother and Nounou finished school in 1928, Nounou sailed with her parents to a French outpost in Cambodia for Leon’s new Army medical duty. Mother got an office job while awaiting the quota number that would let her immigrate to America. “I hated sitting at a desk all day,” she told us when she finally got her number. “I can’t wait to sail to San Francisco and study English.” Fifteen-year-old pals, cast off in opposite directions to see what life had in store.

To pass the time in her newfound Cambodian frontier, Nounou knitted scarves for her mother, finding life boring.

“We did nothing,” she said. “I wasn’t very happy.”

Little did she know that living with her parents in Cambodia was the perfect setting for a devoted couple from opposite ends of the world to meet. The French surveyor met the charming Tahitian blonde over an ice cream cone in a local pharmacy.

The albums showed Claude as a tall, gentle man, with large nose and large hands, hands that would grow magnificent vegetables and fruit when the family retired to Surgères.

Claude quickly asked a colleague who the young woman in the pharmacy was and learned, “she is the stepdaughter of Dr. Guérard, a local VIP who many people dread. »

Although the thirty-three year-old surveyor was smitten, his shyness took over and he persuaded his friend to call on the Guérard family. Unfortunately, Eugenie had one more plan to dictate Nounou’s life, perhaps to keep her from making the same mistake she did as a naïve, young girl. Eugenie had chosen a French suitor. Taking the long trip in 1936 from Singapore, through the Red Sea and the Suez Canal, the family vacationed back in France to arrange a meeting with the suitor. Even with a diamond engagement ring from the new young man, Nounou rebelled and held out for Claude, who had followed them to Paris.

After two arranged breakfasts together, “there were fireworks,” Nounou said, grinning at the thought. She accepted Claude’s proposal and they rushed happily into a wedding ten days later. The ceremony was at St. Anne de la Maison Blanche Catholic Church, where Madeleine later learned her parents couldn’t use the main altar because Nounou was a Protestant.

The photos of them leaving the church were so happy, Claude in a suit, Nounou in her crème short skirt and vest, pausing on the steps to record the romantic moment. Although Eugenie and Leon attended the wedding, they refused to invite Claude’s parents to the wedding supper, undoubtedly an indication the groom wasn’t up to their standards.

“It was horrible,” Nounou said, “but we were very happy.”

My own parents’ wedding, a year before, was somewhat similar, as they rushed off to Reno, Nevada for their nuptials.

“We did it on a whim,” Mother said.

While Nounou’s parents left for an Army medical assignment in Senegal, Nounou and Claude sailed back to Cambodia where once again he was a surveyor for the French State. Subsequent photos in the mid-1930s now included Claude in the blissful married life, surveying geology projects while Nounou happily raised their children. There were the youngsters, frolicking in the sand at Halong Bay, limestone rock islands looming in the background.

Looking closely at the photos, admiring idle Colonials relaxing on their verandas, riding in chauffeur-driven open cars, visiting dignitaries, it was easy to see they had no idea of their impending doom.

The Martin family hadn’t a clue of the war that lay ahead. As the rumblings of World War II began, Nounou and Claude grew fearful of the uprisings and Japanese occupation. In 1940, Claude, a retired Naval officer and engineer, was called back, first to Saigon, then to Hanoi, where he would serve in the IPP, Information Presse Propagande service. Claude and Nounou, two youngsters in tow, took the harrowing, long distance train ride to Hanoi, another experience Noute described as “horrible.”

On the two-day trip, the train puffing along on its old steam engine, there were several stops when passengers had to disembark, recalled Phillippe, the eldest child at four years old.

“We had to wait on the platform while the engineer did maintenance work,” Philippe said. Sadly, the Martin family lost three-year-old Jacquelin as a result of the trip. Their only relief was Christiane’s father greeting them at the station, with a promised accommodation ready.

Japan’s rampage to rule the world turned the French occupation of Southeast Asia upside down. The idyllic life of the Colonial era evaporated. The Japanese invaded French Indochina in March, 1945 and Claude was arrested with all the French men living and working in Hanoi. Claude and all the soldiers and officers were detained in the Citadelle as POWs, leaving Nounou alone with the children, now numbering three. She was devastated but became a strong woman who could handle all the conflicts.

Maybe the Tahiti years with Louisa and the rejection of her mother toughened the petite woman who now was on her own. Or that toughness, plus her friendship with Christiane’s family, also of the Colonial layer, are what got her through the war. For six months, Claude was in the prison camp under wretchedly damp conditions, which left him with life-long dysentery. For six months, Nounou never knew if Claude was dead or alive. When the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs dropped in August, ending the war, Claude was finally released and came home, skin and bones, Nounou said.

“I came home to die,” he told Nounou. But she found the right medicine and in five days he was healing.

“It was extraordinary,” said Nounou, as I thought how life turned lucky for them.

Christiane’s father had found Claude and Noute a place to live in Hanoi near the Bank of Indochina, which he managed. The two French families became good friends.

After the World War II defeat of the Japanese, Christiane’s father became a target for insurgents trying to drive the French from Indochina.

As Christiane told her story, her eyes teared over the horrific incident that happened there nearly sixty years ago. On his way home for lunch one day, the Viet Cong in a political coup assassinated her father. They shot him several times in the head and body, dragged him into Christiane’s front hall, leaving him to die.

We were speechless, trying to understand the feelings of an innocent, eight-year-old Christiane, who, along with four brothers and sisters, witnessed this bloody death of

their beloved father. That day in Surgères she swallowed and sat quietly, almost stoically, mulling over a tragedy she had tried to erase from her mind.

Such violent post-war incidents, intended to foster independence for the Vietnamese, toppled the French. They exited from French Indochina in 1946, ending an era of gaiety and frivolity that left the Colonials with nothing but memories and stacks of photo albums.

In 1947, Nounou and Claude brought their three children back to Paris, including baby Madeleine, born in Hanoi. Now in France, the albums showed colored photos that reflect their life following Claude’s engineering career in Morocco, South America, Africa and England.

On a later trip, my husband and I toured Hanoi, following Christiane’s directions to the Bank of Indochina, now Bank of Vietnam. We walked up the steps and were stunned to connect with the old memories as we stared at the brass “B I” embedded in the entry. Nearby was their white home with green shutters, where the tragedy occurred. We walked around quietly, peeking in the tiny garden and touching the little gate where her father fell.

But now, the dreadful memories are gone and the beautiful home is occupied by the Italian Ambassador, setting the scene for new life in Hanoi.

“I loved it in Indochina,” Nounou said.

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