The Paris Necklace, Part One

Been a long time, been a long time, been a long, lonely, lonely, lonely, lonely time....to quote the immortal Led Zeppelin.  It's been so long since I wrote here that I no longer even resemble the lady in the photo, though I'm too lazy to change it just now.  Suffice it to say the hair color is different and the wrinkles a tad more finely etched.  My dear friend Dajana reminded me of this long-neglected blog today, which prompted me to revisit, since I have a story to tell.

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away (Berkeley, 1982),  Hemingway's "A Moveable Feast" was given to me by a boy I'd met in my English Lit class and with whom I'd gone on a couple of dates as forgettable as he was.  However, he was to prove to be the opposite of forgettable in the long run, since that book impacted me greatly, by introducing me to 2 of my lifelong loves, Hemingway and Paris.  Hemingway being the ultimate misogynist carnivorous hunter bullfight-lover, I'm amazed that I am as fascinated by him as much as I am, not just his writing but his entire larger-than-life persona. Paris, however, is a much easier and simpler love affair which has endured since 1982, though not without its bumps.

After devouring "Feast," I was inspired to change my upcoming summer school program in London to include a week in Paris before school was supposed to start.  I booked my flight accordingly, since I longed to see the Left Bank, where Hemingway and Hadley (the first wife who shared his life during those starving 1920s days he writes about in "Feast") lived in a meager though charming upstairs flat, and, in particular, to visit La Closerie des Lilas, his favorite cafe, where he spent many hours in convivial bonhomie with the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ford Maddox Ford, John Dos Passos, and Ezra Pound, among many other literary legends.  Upon arrival, I fell head over heels in love with Paris, like many starry-eyed twenty-year-olds had done before me, and many since, and promptly extended my stay from one week to two.  Having visited London before, I decided orientation week at summer school was entirely unnecessary compared to the wonder that oozed out of every Parisian nook and cranny.

Having spent my first week at the very upscale home of friends on the Right Bank, I moved to the Left Bank for my second week.  My mother had asked her friend Nevenka Gritz if I might stay with her, her American professor husband Norman, and their 6-year-old son David.  They lived just around the corner from the apartment Hadley and Earnest had shared, and walking distance from the Closerie des Lilas, so of course I couldn't have been more entirely thrilled.  I'd never met the Gritz's before, and was enormously touched with how warmly they welcomed me into their charming home. I will never forget the atmosphere of love and caring that pervaded their apartment, the classical music always playing on the turntable, the intellectual discussions with writers and artists which were a daily feature of life chez Gritz, and the love I developed for David, their only son.  He was a precocious, solemn boy, whose great brown eyes would follow me around the apartment and melt me entirely.  He was so intelligent, so beautiful, and so endearing that I enjoyed spending time with him as much as I enjoyed wandering the Left Bank streets I'd traveled to Paris to discover.  Sharing la vie boheme with the Gritz's in the Paris of 1982 when I was 21, was an experience which seeped into my very DNA.

Although decades have passed since then, I have never forgotten the happiness of their home.  Now, all these decades later, I know what I didn't then: that that kind of happiness in a home is the rarest and most beautiful of things, and anyone fortunate enough to reap that gift, is truly blessed by all the gods.  The Gritz's were just simply happy, not living in any great style, but in an atmosphere of close and loving family life.  David was the glowing center of it all, a child so exceptionally bright and charming that he had all of us wrapped around his little finger.  To this day, I still have a photo of David, taken at my mother's home in Los Angeles a year or two later.  He's sitting on a bed looking at the camera with those enormous, wise eyes.  He's got his Asterix t-shirt on and some white shorts--it must have been summertime.  That photo, in its dated Laura Ashley frame, has followed me to every home in which I've ever lived, and always has had pride of place in my collection.  There have been very few children which have succeeded in winning my heart, but David was special, and left his mark there.

That summer of 1982, I returned to Paris while at my London summer school program, and Lisa Brackelmanns came with me.  She was also from L.A., we met at the program, and have remained great friends to this day.  We both stayed with the Gritz's, who never ceased to amaze me with their generosity in welcoming a total stranger into their charmed life and home.  I was lucky to be so welcomed, and to bring Lisa with me.  We had a marvelous time, except that I had misguidedly insisted on going for Bastille Day, which I though would be some marvelous party, but instead was a nadir of debauchery and bacchanalia which reminded me of what it must be like in Rio for Carnival, or New Orleans for Mardi Gras, the antithesis of anything I'd enjoy.  It was a miracle that we made it back to the Gritz's relatively unscathed, though not un-groped, and the next time I found myself in Paris on Bastille Day, I locked myself in my hotel room before 5 p.m. and didn't emerge until the next day.

I don't recall whether or not I kept in touch with the Gritz's independently of just through my mother after that charmed summer.  They did come to visit a year or 2 later, at which time I took my photo of David, but as far as I recall, that was the last time I saw them.

Enamored so of Paris, I prevailed on my mother and her husband to visit at the end of the summer, once my London studies were done.  Being reduced to my last farthings, I once again threw myself on the warm embrace of the Gritz's, who took me in as I waited for my mother and her husband to meet me there before we'd continue on to our native Croatia.  I recall the day that they arrived, I took my last centimes and visited a patisserie on the Gritz's block.  Once they arrived, we explored the city and they, too, never having seen it before, fell in love with glorious Paris.  Eventually they purchased a small apartment there, which I never had a chance to see.  Years later, when they divorced, my mother accused Nevenka Gritz of colluding with my stepfather to cheat her of her rightful part in the apartment.  Because it was decades ago, the particulars of the situation are lost to me, though I do remember being shocked and skeptical that Nevenka, one of the kindest women I'd known, would be capable of such perfidy.  On the other hand, my loyalty was to my mother, who was hurt and outraged, so, regrettably, I never spoke to Nevenka, Norman nor David again, even though I returned to Paris several times over the course of the subsequent decades, always remembering fondly that first, magical summer, when I was 21, heartbroken for the first time, and healed by the glory that was Paris and the warmth and sweetness of the Gritz home.

One day in 2002, I was living with my then-boyfriend, whom I always refer to obliquely as He Who (short for He Who Shall Not Be Named), and reading the Los Angeles Times.  An article on the front page caught my attention: a bomb had been planted at the Mount Scopus campus of Hebrew University in Jerusalem; 9 people dead, 100 injured.  As I scanned the names of the dead,  a name leaped out at me which felt like it was searing my retina: David Gritz.  My heart stopped and my throat was suddenly bone-dry.  "It cannot be him.  It's another David Gritz.  It can't be him.  IT CANNOT BE HIM!!!!"  But....the age was about what his would be (24), he had lived in Paris....his father was American....I still refused to believe it.  I dropped the paper and, sobbing, phoned my mother to ask her to reach out to mutual friends and find out whether it could possibly be him.  She did, and, of course, it was.  Devastated and overwhelmed with guilt that I'd made no effort to contact them through the years, I somehow forced myself to go to work, where, after continuously breaking down in tears, I was pitied and sent home.

My mother and I immediately wrote to Nevenka and Norman, sympathy letters filled with emotion, and of course, we never heard anything from them.  During the ensuing years, I frequently thought of them, especially when my eye would fall on that photo of little David, looking at me with those big, dark eyes.  I never forgave myself for not contacting them.  When I did go to Paris again, in 2007, I was too ashamed and afraid to contact them even then.

David

Once I learned about the internet and got a computer, a long time after everyone else on earth had, I would occasionally look up Norman and Nevenka to see what, if anything, I could discover about them.  I read of the beautiful memorial service for David in Jerusalem; that he had been a violinist, like me, that he had loved music and had been cultured and intellectual like his parents.  I read that in 2006, 4 years after David's terrible murder, Norman had succumbed to cancer, and I couldn't help but think that it had to have been David's death that allowed the cancer to claim his father.  It was just unbearable to think that, of that beautiful, happy family, in that charming, cozy Left Bank flat, living a life as close to perfect as most humans could aspire to, everyone but Nevenka was now gone.  When something so all-consumingly terrible happens, I wondered, how in the world does one go on? I didn't believe that I could; it would take so much more strength than what I have.

Last year (2015), I once again looked up Nevenka on the internet, and was amazed to find the names of Norman and Nevenka Gritz among the plaintiffs in a massive case brought by victims of terrorism against the Palestinian Liberation Organization (Sokolow vs. PLO).  Plainly this case had been brought years ago, while Norman had still been alive, but, surprisingly, I had never heard of it.  Even then, in 2015 when it had been adjudicated and a judgement rendered, I had still not heard of it, though I was grimly thrilled that the decision was against the murdering monsters of the PLO, to the tune of about $655 million.  Reading further about the case, I was happy to find that this decision was so damaging to the PLO, regardless of whether or not they ever paid a penny of that blood money, because it damaged any chance they might have had to be allowed into a respectable world body such as the U.N. or NATO.  Now that they had been judged in the eyes of the world to be the murderous thugs that they were, I fervently hoped that Nevenka would find at least some small modicum of comfort and closure.

Like so often before, I longed to reach out to Nevenka.  As always, I couldn't think of what I could possibly say to her, how or where to begin.  I also thought it would be indecorous to reach out when she had been granted a large sum of money.  So, as always, I did nothing.  But what I did do, shortly after, was to start reading books about Hemingway.  I read biographies of his wives, I read about the Spanish Civil War about which he had been so passionate, and, for the first time since 1982, I re-read "A Moveable Feast."

In 1999, at the beginning of my relationship with He Who, we had gone to Paris together.  We were passionately in love, in the most beautiful and romantic city in the world.  It was a heady time, pre-9/11 when the world changed, and our week there played out like a stereotypical romance novel, or one of my favorite ABBA songs, "Our Last Summer:" "We made our way along the river and we sat down in the grass, by the Eiffel Tower.  I was so happy we had met, it was the age of no regrets...I can still recall our last summer, I still see it all: walks along the Seine, laughing in the rain, our last summer, memories that we made."

I'd returned to Paris only once since that summer, in 2007, when my relationship with He Who was dying an agonizing death.  I'd been alone, and the contrast with the summer of 1999 had been excruciating.  Ever since then, I'd avoided any mention of Paris.  It had come to represent a romantic ideal I'd once been fortunate enough to live, but was now lost to me forever.  I'd even refused to watch Woody Allen's "Midnight in Paris," even though my friends all assured me I'd love it.

Now, however, many years had passed, and after re-reading "Feast" and all the other Hemingway-related books I'd devoured, and watching "Hemingway and Gellhorn" about his marriage to the brilliant and brave war correspondent and journalist Martha Gellhorn, I once again developed the same itch to see Paris that I'd had in 1982.  My strength had returned, and I believed that I'd be able to relish it with clear eyes; I was even able to watch "Midnight in Paris, " and enjoyed it.