The Kites Read online

  I found myself alone. I stared stupidly at the bloodstains at my feet. I’d managed to empty myself of my vengeance and rancor, but they were replaced with an unease I couldn’t shake off. Hans’s attitude had a dignity to it that unsettled me.

  I didn’t really get what was troubling me until the next morning. Marek had been arrested with the purloined objects. He had confessed. He had taken advantage of the presence of guests he saw as disreputable in the castle — namely, the writer and the psychic — to pilfer the contents of Madame Bronicka’s office and little sitting room; interrupted by a manservant who had come into the bedroom, he had placed the box in my closet, intending to return for it later on. But my presence had disturbed him in his first attempt and he had only been able to recover the loot during dinner.

  It was nine in the morning when Bruno gave me this news in the dining room, where I had joined him for breakfast. I felt a chill overtake me, and I’d forgotten about the teapot in my hand until my cup overflowed onto the tablecloth. I pushed back my chair and left the table with Bruno gazing after me in surprise. Never before had I experienced such hatred, and the man I hated with such intensity was myself. I understood that in imagining I was the victim of such an ignoble plot at the hands of my rival, there was no one to find guilty but me. And yet, there could be no question of my seeking out Hans and apologizing to him. I quite preferred recognizing the mediocrity of my own soul to humiliating myself in front of them.

  I did not come down for lunch, and at around four o’clock in the afternoon, I began packing my suitcase. I almost regretted not having stolen the objects, not having been exposed publicly as the thief — for there would have been a kind of aggression to it, an almost triumphal manner of breaking with a milieu that was not mine.

  I left my room only at the end of the afternoon, to make arrangements for my departure. I didn’t want to see or thank anyone; I didn’t even want to say goodbye. But I ran into Tad in the corridor; he asked me what I was doing there with my suitcase. He told me that Hans had had an accident during a late-night ride; in the moonless dark, a branch had given him a deep scrape on the cheek — but again, he asked, what on earth was I doing there with my suitcase in hand? I explained to him that I wanted to be driven to the station; there was a nine o’clock train for Warsaw; I was returning to France; if war broke out, I didn’t want to run the risk of being cut off from my country. It was at that moment I saw Hans, at the other end of the corridor, walking slowly toward us, holding his everlasting round box of English cigarettes; a bandage covered his left cheek. He stopped near to us, very pale, but strangely peaceful, and glanced at the suitcase I held in my hand.

  “I’m leaving tonight,” he announced, then turned on his heel and walked away.

  21

  I remained in Gródek a few more days. The rain had come to blur the landscape, and above our heads, the sky croaked with the voices of invisible crows. It was on one such foggy afternoon, as we were walking along the beach, while the wind stuck sea drops to our faces, that the future signaled to us. It was a Jew, dressed in a long caftan known in Polish as a kapota; on his head was one of those tall black hats that millions of Jews then wore in their ghettos. He had a very pale face and a gray beard, and he was seated on a mile marker by the side of the road to Gdynia. Perhaps because I was not expecting to find him there at the edge of that empty road, or because his appearance, in the vague, misty shades of the air, had something ghostly about it; or maybe the bundle tied to a stick he was carrying on his shoulder made my memory flood with the legend of millennia of wandering — suddenly, I felt an apprehension and an unease whose premonitory nature I would recognize only much later. At the time what I saw there was one of history’s most banal and on the whole normal conjunctions: a Jew, a road, and a marker.

  Timidly, Lila called out to him. “Dzień dobry panu, hello, sir.”

  But he did not respond, and turned his head away.

  “Tad is convinced we are on the verge of an invasion,” Lila murmured.

  “I don’t know a thing about it, but I just can’t believe there could be a war,” I told her.

  “There always have been.”

  “That was before …”

  I was going to say, “That was before I met you,” but it was presumptuous on my part to launch into such an explanation of the origins of war, hatred, and massacre. I still lacked the authority it would have required to bring people to share in my understanding. “Modern weapons have become too powerful and too destructive,” I declared. “No one will dare to use them, because there wouldn’t be any winners or losers, only ruins …” I had read that in an editorial in the Times, to which the Bronickis subscribed.

  I wrote a thirty-page letter to Lila, starting over several times; I ended up throwing it into the fire, because it was only a love letter — I didn’t manage to do any better than that.

  It was Bruno, on the day of my departure, as the fog drove its woolen flocks through the air outside, who spoke to Lila in my name.

  I had just entered the sitting room with her. I took a last look at the butterfly collections in their glass cases, which covered an entire wall. They reminded me of my Uncle Ambrose’s kites: little scraps of dreams.

  Bruno was sitting in an armchair, paging through some sheet music. He lifted his eyes and watched us for a moment, smiling. I never once saw anything but kindness in his smiles. Then he got up and took a seat at the piano. His hands already resting on the keyboard, he turned to us and observed us a long time, attentively, like a painter studying a model before sketching his first line. He began to play.

  He was improvising. He was improvising us. It was Lila and me, our separation and our certitude, that his melody spoke of. I heard myself love, despair, and believe. I lost Lila and I found her. Misfortune raised its black shadow over us and then all became joy. And it took me a few minutes to understand that Bruno was giving me the brotherly gift of what he himself was feeling.

  Lila fled, weeping. Bruno got up and came over to me, in the light of the great, pale windows, and hugged me.

  “I’m glad I could talk to you one last time. As for me, really all I have left is music …” He laughed. “Obviously, it’s a bit frightening to love and to know that all you can do with your love is play another concert. But at the same time, it’s given me a source of inspiration that’s not likely to dry up anytime soon. There are at least fifty years in it, if my fingers hold out. I imagine Lila so clearly, sitting in the audience in her old age; I can see her listening to me as I tell her about herself, traveling back to when she was twenty.” He shut his eyes and, for an instant, held his hand over his eyelids. “Oh, well. There are loves that end, apparently. I read that somewhere.”

  I spent my last hours with Lila. The presence of happiness was almost audible, as if hearing had broken with the superficialities of sound and finally penetrated the deepest parts of silence, which before had been hidden by solitude. Our moments of sleep had that kind of warmth where you cannot tell the dream from the body, the nest from the wings. I can still feel the imprint of her profile on my chest — perhaps invisible, but my fingers find it faithfully in the leaden hours of this physical error that is one body alone.

  My memory seized every instant, setting it aside. Where I come from we call that a nest egg; there was enough for me there to last a lifetime.

  22

  Leaning out of the window as we approached Cléry, I knew who’d come to meet me as soon as I saw the Polish eagle floating high above the station. When I looked carefully, however, I noticed the old pacifist had made it so the bird, too warlike for his taste, resembled a beautiful two-headed dove. It had been five weeks since our parting and I found Ambrose Fleury worried and aged.

  “Well, well, look who’s a society gent now! What’s this?” He brushed his finger over the insignia of the Gdynia Yachting Club, which had been solemnly presented to me the day before my departure from Gr�
�dek as a symbol of Poland’s free access to the sea. Never more than in that month of August 1939 were doubts and anxieties so closely accompanied by gesticulations and ostentatious displays of confidence.

  “It’ll be any minute now, apparently,” I told him.

  “That’s what you think. The people will never allow themselves to be led to the slaughterhouse again.” Ambrose Fleury reeled his dove back down to the ground — as usual, as soon as he showed up somewhere, he was immediately swarmed by children — and tucked the kite under his arm. We walked a little ways and my uncle opened the door of a small automobile.

  “That’s right,” he said, seeing my surprise. “Lord Howe gave it to me, you remember, he came to visit us before.”

  At sixty-three, my uncle was now a nationally respected figure, and his reputation had garnered him decorations from the Academy — recognition he had always refused.

  As soon as we got to La Motte, I ran to the workshop. In my absence, maybe because the threat of war troubled him more than he was willing to let on, Ambrose Fleury had returned to his “humanist period,” enriching its ranks with all that France has to offer those who believe in its lights. The “Encyclopedist” series looked especially good as it hung from the beams, if a bit listless, as is always the case when they lack wide-open spaces.

  “I’ve been working a lot, as you can see,” my guardian told me, smoothing his mustache and looking pleased with himself. “The days we’re living through right now are making us lose our heads a little. We have to remember who we are.”

  We weren’t Rousseau, we weren’t Diderot, we weren’t Voltaire: we were Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin. Never had the “Enlightenment” kites of Cléry’s former postman seemed so trivial to me. All the same, my love was a blindness, from which I could draw all I needed to continue believing in the wisdom of men; nor did my uncle doubt for one second that peace would hold, as if his heart alone could triumph over history.

  One night, when I was off with Lila on the Baltic shore, I felt a tug at my arm pulling me back. There was Ambrose Fleury, dressed in a long shirt that lent amplitude to his body, sitting on my bed with a candle in his hand. In his gaze was more pain than is really strictly necessary to make a man look like a man.

  “They’ve given orders for general mobilization. But of course mobilization isn’t war.”

  “Of course not,” I replied. Still not entirely awake, I added, “The Bronickis are coming back to France for Christmas.”

  My uncle raised the candle so he could see my face better.

  “They say love is blind but who knows — with you blindness might just be another way of seeing …”

  In the hours leading up to the invasion of Poland, I stuck to my role in the great collective turkey ballet being performed across the country with impeccable stupidity: everyone was straining to see whose leg could reach the highest for our imaginary kick in the Germans’ pants, dancing the French cancan on a cabaret stage that stretched all the way from the Pyrenees to the Maginot Line. POLAND WILL STAND, clamored the newspapers and the radio, and I knew with happy certainty that a barricade of the world’s most valiant chests was puffed up around Lila; I remembered the battalions of cavalrymen who’d marched singing through Gródek with their swords and their flags. The “historical memory” of the Polish people, I told my uncle, was an inexhaustible fount of courage, honor, and fidelity; turning the dial of our old wireless, I waited impatiently for hostilities to begin, for the first victory bulletins, and grew irritated when the commentators discussed “last-ditch attempts to salvage peace.” I saw my older comrades off at the station as they were mobilized; together, we sang, “We’ll win glory like our fathers”; I felt my eyes grow misty when I saw strangers shaking hands in the street and shouting, “Long live Poland, sir!” I listened as our priest, old Father Tachin, announced from the pulpit that “heathen Germany will be felled like a rotten tree”; I went and admired my old teacher, Monsieur Leduc, who’d put on his old horizon-blue uniform and decorations to remind young people of what a tough old veteran of the Great War looked like, vouchsafing our new victory. I barely saw my uncle, who remained shut up in his room, and, when I came and knocked at his door, I heard him bark at me, “Leave me alone and go ass around with the others, you little snot.”

  On September 3, I was sitting by the empty fireplace, black with burnt-away fires. From the workshop I heard strange cracking noises. They didn’t sound like what I usually heard when my uncle was at work. I got up, vaguely worried, and crossed the courtyard.

  Broken kites trailed their shreds and tatters everywhere. Ambrose Fleury had his beloved Montaigne in his hands; in one swift motion he broke it over his knee. I spied among the mangled pieces some of our best work, notably my uncle’s favorites: Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Liberty Lighting the People. Not even the works from his “naive period” had been spared, all the dragonflies and children’s dreams that had so often lent their innocence to the sky. Ambrose Fleury had already smashed a good third of his collection to smithereens. Never before had I seen such an explosion of distress on his face.

  “They declared war,” he called out to me in a strangled voice. He ripped his Jean Jaurès off the wall and crushed it with his heel. I leapt forward, tackled my uncle bodily, and pushed him out the door. I felt nothing, I thought nothing. The only thing I knew was that we had to save the last of the kites.

  23

  The first news of the Polish debacle plunged me into a state of shock from which I have kept just one memory: my uncle sitting on my bed, his hand resting on my knee. The wireless had just announced that the entire region of Gródek, on the Baltic shore, had been flattened by bombs. The battleship Schleswig-Holstein, with no declaration of war, had suddenly opened fired with its cannons. A historical detail was carefully added regarding this moment of honor for the German navy: a few days prior, the battleship, disguised as a training ship, had requested permission from the Polish authorities to drop anchor “for a courtesy call.”

  “Don’t cry, Ludo. They’ll be counting misery in the millions before too long. Of course it speaks to your heart with just the one voice; that’s normal. But since you’re such a math whiz, you ought to consider the law of large numbers. Right now you can’t count higher than two; I understand that. And then again, who knows …

  “It’s still possible that the war will be over in a few days,” he went on, his gaze lost in some depths of hope — he was, after all, a Fleury, one of those crazies whose vindication of human rights sometimes means denying rights to excessively odious realities. “Europe’s peoples are too old — they’ve suffered too much to let themselves be forced to go on with this indignity. They’re saying that secret negotiations are already underway in Geneva. The German masses are going to sweep Hitler from power. We have to trust in the German people, just like we do all the other peoples.”

  I lifted myself up on one elbow. “Kites of the world, unite,” I said.

  Ambrose Fleury did not seem hurt by my hostility. And I knew better than anyone that there are things you can’t break in men’s hearts because they are unattainable.

  I ran to enlist. My pulse was racing at 120 beats per minute and I was declared unfit for service. I attempted to explain that it wasn’t a physical problem — it was one of love and tragedy, but at that the military doctor only fixed me with a severer look. I wandered through the countryside, indignant at the serenity of those fields and woods — never had this nature seemed further away from man’s. The only news that reached me of Lila was the news that an entire people had been crushed. A kind of shattering femininity emanated from the body of martyred Poland.

  People looked at me a little strangely in Cléry. Rumor had it that I had been declared unfit for military service because, like all the Fleurys, I was a little wrong in the head: “It’s hereditary in them.” I was beginning to understand that what I was feeling was not common currency, as they say, and that
for the sound of mind, love is not the meaning of life, but only a little side benefit.

  The moment finally came when Ambrose Fleury, although he was the very man who had devoted his life to kites, began to be seriously concerned. During the evening meal, beneath the oil lamp that hung over our heads, he said to me: “Ludo, it can’t go on like this. You’ve been seen walking through the streets talking to a woman who isn’t there. They’re going to lock you up one of these days.”

  “Well, so let them lock us up. In or out, she’ll stay with me.”

  “Shit,” said my uncle, and it was the first time that he spoke the language of reason to me in this manner.

  It was, I believe, to reel me back down to earth that he asked Marcellin Duprat to take me in hand. What the two men said to each other I never did find out, but the chef of the Clos Joli invited me to accompany him on his morning rounds from market to farm, throwing vigorous winks my way from time to time as if to reassure himself that the healthy reality of the Norman soil’s sturdy produce — by nature a powerful antidote to the loss of reason — was having the desired curative effect upon my “state.”

  During those winter months in 1940, when the war was limited to sorties, patrols, and the occasional ambush along the Maginot Line, when “time was on our side,” you had to reserve your table at the restaurant several days in advance — “to put in your application” as Curnonsky, the Prince of Gastronomy, liked to say. Every evening, after he closed up, Marcellin Duprat would page with satisfaction through the big red leather volume he kept in his office, stopping on a page that bore the fresh signature of some new minister or as-yet-unvanquished military chief, and say to me: “You’ll see, kid. Some day they’ll come and study the guest book of the Clos Joli to write the history of the Third Republic!”