The Kites Read online

For a while I thought that Madame Julie was practicing to open a “classy” house, then recalled that she was Jewish and didn’t see how such a leap in social status could be accomplished if the Nazis won the war, as she was so convinced they would. Perhaps she was thinking of opening a luxury bordello in Portugal, a country in which she seemed to have an interest.

  “Are you going to flee to Portugal?”

  The shadow of dark fuzz on her upper lip quivered with scorn. “I’m not the fleeing kind.” She crushed her cigarette and looked me straight in the eye. “But they won’t have my hide, I’ll tell you that.”

  I was confused by this mix of courage and defeatism. I was also too young to understand such a will to survive. And in the state of anxiety and emotional deprivation into which I was currently plunged, life didn’t seem to deserve that kind of attachment.

  Julie Espinoza continued to observe me. It was as if she were trying me and preparing to deliver the verdict.

  One night, I dreamed that I was standing on the roof and that Madame Julie was standing below, on the sidewalk, her eyes raised to me, waiting for me to jump so she could catch me in her arms. Ultimately, the moment came when, seated across from her in the kitchen, I hid my face in my hands and broke down sobbing. She listened to me until two in the morning amidst the noise of the bidets, which didn’t ever really stop in the Hôtel du Passage.

  “Who is that stupid?” she murmured, when I informed her of my intent to make it back to Poland at all costs. “I don’t understand why they didn’t take you in the army, fool that you are.”

  “I was exempted. My heart beats too fast.”

  “Listen to me, kid. I’m sixty years old, but sometimes I feel like I’ve lived — survived, if you rather — for five thousand years, and even like I was there before that, at the beginning of the world. Don’t forget my name, either. Espinoza.” She laughed. “Almost like Spinoza, the philosopher, maybe you’ve heard of him. I could even drop the E and call myself Spinoza, that’s how much I know …”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  “Because pretty soon things are going to get so bad, it’s going to be such a shitstorm that you and your big booboo are going to disappear in it. We’re going to lose the war and we’ll have the Germans in France.”

  I set down my glass. “France can’t lose the war. It’s impossible.”

  She half closed one eye, over her cigarette. “Impossible isn’t French,” she said.

  Madame Julie stood, the Pekinese in her arms, and went to pick up her bag from a bottle-green plush armchair. She drew out a roll of banknotes and returned to the table.

  “Take this, to start with. There’ll be more later.”

  I looked at the money on the table.

  “Well, what are you waiting for?”

  “Listen, Madame Julie, there’s enough to live on for a year there, and I’m not too keen on living.”

  She chuckled. “Awww, it wants to die of love,” she said. “Well, you’d better get cracking. People are going to start dying like flies, and it won’t be from love, I’ll tell you that much.”

  I felt a rush of sympathy for this woman. Perhaps I was starting to sense that when people speak disdainfully of “whores” and “madams,” they’re locating human dignity in the ass, to make it easier to forget how low the rest of us can sink.

  “I still don’t understand why you’re giving me this money.”

  She was seated in front of me, with her mauve woolen shawl drawn across her flat chest, with her dome of black hair, her bohemian eyes, and her long fingers playing with the little golden lizard pinned to her bodice.

  “Of course you don’t understand. Which is why I’m going to explain it to you. I need a guy like you. I’m putting myself together a little team.”

  And so it was that in February 1940, while the English were singing “We’re Going to Hang Out the Washing on the Siegfried Line,” the posters were proclaiming that We Will Win Because We Are Strongest, and the Clos Joli was resounding with victory toasts, one old madam was getting ready for the German Occupation. I don’t think that anyone else in the country had at that time thought to organize what would later be called “a resistance network.” I was charged with making contact with a certain number of people — including a forger who, after a twenty-year sentence, was still nostalgic for his profession — and Madame Julie so thoroughly convinced me to keep it all a secret that even today I barely dare to write their names. There was Monsieur Dampierre, who lived alone with a canary — and here it must be said to the Gestapo’s credit that they spared the canary, taking it into their care when Monsieur Dampierre died of a heart attack under questioning in 1942. There was Monsieur Pageot, who would later be known as Valérian, two years before his execution by firing squad with twenty others on a hill that bore the same name; and Police Commissioner Rotard, who became the head of the Alliance network and who spoke of Madame Julie Espinoza in his book The Underground Years: “A woman in whom there was a total absence of illusion, born no doubt of the long exercise of her profession. Sometimes I imagined her receiving a visit from dishonor, whom she knew so well, and hearing its confidence: it must have murmured in her ear, ‘My hour is coming soon, my good Julie. Get ready.’ At any rate, she was very persuasive, and I helped her to organize a group, which met regularly to envision various measures to be taken, from forging paperwork to choosing safe houses where we could meet or hide out during the German Occupation — which she did not doubt for a single instant would occur.”

  One day, after a visit to a pharmacist in the rue Gobin, who gave me some “medicine” whose nature and intended recipient I would learn only much later, I asked Madame Espinoza, “Do you pay for them?”

  “No, my little Ludo. Some things you can’t buy.” She shot a strange look in my direction, a mixture of sadness and harshness. “They’ll be sent to the firing squad — future victims.”

  Another day I wanted to know why she didn’t flee to Switzerland or Portugal, if she was so sure that the war was lost and considered the German invasion a certainty.

  “We already talked about that. I told you: I’m not the fleeing kind.” She laughed. “Maybe that’s what old lady Fulbillac meant when she kept saying I wasn’t ‘the right sort of person.’”One morning, I noticed some photographs in the corner of her kitchen, one of Salazar, the Portuguese dictator; one of Admiral Horthy, regent of Hungary; and even one of Hitler. “I’m waiting for someone to come autograph them for me,” she explained.

  Madame Julie never did trust me enough to tell me the new name she intended to adopt, and when the “specialist” arrived to sign the portraits I was asked to leave the room.

  She made me get a driver’s license.

  “It could be useful.”

  The only thing the boss was unable to predict was the date of the German offensive and the defeat that would follow. She was expecting something “as soon as the weather turns nice,” and was worried about what her girls would come to. There were thirty or forty of them, working in shifts around the clock at the Hôtel du Passage. She advised them to take German lessons but there wasn’t a whore in France who believed we’d lose the war.

  I was surprised at her confidence in me. Why such unhesitating trust in a boy of twenty? Life might still make anything of me — which was not necessarily an endorsement.

  “I could be making a mistake,” she acknowledged. “But you want me to tell you? You’ve got that firing-squad look in your eyes.”

  “Shit,” I said.

  She laughed.

  “Scared you, eh? But that doesn’t necessarily mean twelve bullets to the head. You can live to a ripe old age with it. It’s your Polish girl. She gives you that look. Don’t worry. You’ll see her again.”

  “How can you know, Madame Julie?”

  She hesitated, as if she didn’t want to hurt me. “It would be too beautiful, if
you didn’t see her again. It would stay whole. Things rarely stay whole in this life.”

  Two or three times a week, I continued to show up at the French headquarters of the Polish army, and finally, a sergeant, sick of my questions, called out to me, “We don’t know anything for sure but it’s more than likely that the whole Bronicki family died in the bombing.” But I was certain that Lila was alive. I even felt her presence growing by my side, like a premonition.

  At the beginning of April, Madame Julie disappeared for a few days. She returned with a bandage on her face. When the compress was removed, Julie Espinoza’s nose had lost its slightly hunchbacked look and had become straight — shorter, even. I didn’t ask her any questions, but seeing my astonishment, she told me, “The first thing those bastards will look at is noses.”

  I ended up with such complete trust in her judgment that when the Germans broke through at Sedan, I wasn’t surprised. Nor was I surprised when, a few days later, she sent me to get her Citroën from the garage. Returning and entering her room, I found her sitting among her suitcases with Chong, a glass of eau-de-vie in her hand, listening to the news on the radio, which was announcing that “nothing has been lost.”

  “Some nothing,” she observed.

  She set down the glass, picked up the dog, and rose to her feet.

  “Right, we’ll go now.”

  “Where?”

  “We’ll go a little ways, together — you’re going home to Normandy, and that’s in the same general direction.”

  It was June 2, and there was no trace of defeat on the roads. In the villages we drove through, everything was peaceful. Madame Espinoza let me drive, then took the wheel herself. She was wearing a gray coat with a mauve hat and scarf.

  “Where are you going to hide, Madame Julie?”

  “I’m not going to hide at all, my friend. The ones who hide are always the ones they find. I’ve had smallpox twice; the Nazis just make it a third time.”

  “But what are you going to do?”

  She smiled faintly and said nothing. A few miles from Vervaux, she stopped the car.

  “Here we are. We’ll say goodbye. You’ll make it home from here, it’s not too far.”

  She gave me a kiss. “I’ll be in touch. Soon we’ll be needing little guys like you.”

  She touched my cheek. “Go on, now.”

  “You’re not going to tell me I’ve got that firing-squad look, again, are you?”

  “Let’s just say you’ve got what it takes. When a guy knows how to love like you do — to love a woman who’s not there anymore — then chances are you know how to love other things, too … other things that won’t be there anymore either, when the Nazis start in on them.”

  I was outside, holding my old suitcase. I felt sad. “At least tell me where you’re going!”

  She started the car. Standing in the middle of the road, I wondered what would become of her. I was also a little disappointed in her lack of trust, in the end. Apparently, whatever she’d read in my eyes wasn’t enough. Oh well. Maybe it was for the best. Maybe I didn’t have that firing-squad look after all. I still had a chance.

  25

  A military truck picked me up on the road and I got to Cléry by three o’clock that afternoon. You could hear the radio through the open windows. We would be stopping the enemy at the Loire. I didn’t even think that Madame Julie could have stopped the enemy at the Loire.

  I found my uncle at work. As soon as I walked in, I was struck by the change of atmosphere in the workshop: Ambrose Fleury was up to his knees in French history at its most warlike. Scattered pell-mell around him were the Charles Martels, the Louis, the Godefroy de Bouillons, the Roland de Roncevaux — all the men who had, in France, ever shown their teeth to the enemy. Everyone was there, from Charlemagne up to the field marshals of the Empire; even Napoleon himself — of whom my guardian had formerly liked to say, “Put a fedora on him and it’s Al Capone.” Needle and thread in hand, he was repairing a Joan of Arc that must have run into trouble, for the doves that were supposed to bear her to heaven were hanging off to one side, and her sword had been broken following some unfortunate run-in with the ground. For an old pacifist and conscientious objector, it was a conversion that left me dumb with surprise. I sincerely doubted that this change of heart corresponded with some influx of new commissions, for in all of its history, rarely had the country been less inclined to take an interest in kites. Ambrose Fleury himself had changed. Never had I known his face to look harder. He was sitting there, with his mangled Joan of Arc on his lap, offering an excellent example of all the fury that it was possible to muster in an old Norman mug. He did not get up from his bench; he barely even nodded at me.

  “Well, what’s new?” he demanded, and the question left me speechless, as all defensive effort had just been abandoned and Paris was declared an open city. It seemed to me we ought to be asking each other an entirely different kind of question. But it was only June 1940 and we hadn’t yet entered the era when Frenchmen would be tortured and killed for things that no longer existed anywhere but inside their own heads.

  “I couldn’t get any news. I tried everything. But I’m sure she’s alive and that she’ll come back.”

  Ambrose Fleury gave a little nod of approval. “Good, Ludo. Germany won the war. The whole country’s about to be overrun by good sense, prudence, and reason. You’d have to be nuts to keep on hoping and believing. To me, this means only one thing.” He looked at me. “We’ll have to be nuts.”

  I should perhaps recall that in those hours of capitulation, madness had not yet come into the heads of Frenchmen. There was still only one madman, and he was in London.

  It was a few days after my return that I saw my first Germans. We had no funds, and I resigned myself to returning to Marcellin Duprat’s, if he would still have me. My uncle had gone to see him at the moment that it became clear that nothing could stop the Wehrmacht’s crushing advance any longer; he’d found Marcellin standing with reddened eyes before the map of France that decorated the wall of the entryway, the one with each province featuring a picture of its noblest produce. He had placed his finger on the ham illustrating the Ardennes, and said: “I don’t know how far the Germans will get but we’ve got to keep our lines of communication open with the Périgord at all costs. Without truffles and foie gras, the Clos Joli is fucked. We’re lucky Spain’s stayed neutral — it’s the only place I can get decent saffron.”

  “I think he’s gone crazy, too,” my uncle had reported to me admiringly.

  There were three tanks on the road in front of the garden and an armored car by the door, beneath the magnolias in bloom. I expected to be questioned, but the German soldiers didn’t even glance at me. I crossed the vestibule; the shutters of the rotunda and the galleries were closed; two German officers were seated at a table, studying a map. Marcellin Duprat stood back in the shadows striped with light, in the company of Monsieur Jean, the octogenarian sommelier, who no doubt had made his way to the abandoned Clos Joli to offer what comfort he could to his boss. Duprat had his arms crossed over his chest and his head held high but his eyes looked a little wild, and he spoke in a raised voice, as if wanting to make sure that the two German officers could hear him.

  “I’ll give you this: it’s looking like a good year. Maybe even one of our best. Just as long as there aren’t any sudden rains to wash out the vineyards …”

  “Well, it’s off to a good start anyway,” Monsieur Jean said, smiling in the middle of his wrinkles. “France will remember the ’40 harvest; I sense it’s going to be one of our finest vintages. I’ve heard good things from all over. The Beaujolais, all of Burgundy, the Bordelais … News has never been this good. This year’s wines will have more body than in the entire history of our vineyards. It’ll hold.”

  “In the whole memory of France, we’ve never seen a June like this one,” Duprat acknowledged. “The heavens see
m to be with us. Not a cloud in the sky. The vines are starting to flower; in ninety days it will be in the bag. Some people are getting discouraged — they’re saying it’s too good to last. But me — I trust in the vineyards. That’s how it’s always been in France. What you lose on one end you gain on the other.”

  “Alsace wines are toast, obviously,” Monsieur Jean remarked.

  “And a map with no Alsace is a national disaster,” Duprat admitted, raising his voice slightly. “But when you think about it, I have enough in my cellar to hold for four or five years, and after that, with a little luck, we’ll be able to supply ourselves again … Point sent someone from Vienne: apparently things couldn’t be better up his way, the vineyards are really outdoing themselves. Things are even holding up in the Loire, I hear. France is a funny country, old friend. When everything looks like it’s in the toilet, we suddenly realize the fundamentals are still there.”

  Monsieur Jean raised his hand to wipe away a tear from among the smile wrinkles. “Yes, indeed. I tell you, Monsieur Duprat, in a few years we’ll think back to 1940 and say, ‘We won’t see a year like that again!’ I know some folks who are looking at their vineyards and weeping from emotion, that’s how good the vines are looking this year!”

  The two German officers remained bent over their map. I thought it was a military map of France. I was wrong. It was a map of France, all right, but it was the one from the Clos Joli: Terrine de fumet aux truffes Marcellin Duprat. Filet de mostelle à l’estragon. Lapereau du bocage normand au vinaigre de framboise. Coquille à la dieppoise. I knew the map by heart, right down to the bowl of cider. Observing the two German officers, it suddenly occurred to me that the war wasn’t actually lost yet. One of the officers stood up and walked over to Duprat.

  “The commanding general of the German army in Normandy and His Excellency the ambassador Otto Abetz will be lunching here with fourteen people this Friday,” he said. “His Excellency the ambassador Abetz often came to your restaurant before the war and he wishes to remember himself to you. It is important to him that the Clos Joli uphold its reputation, and to this end he will give you all the help that is required. He asked us to send you his best wishes for the future.”