The Kites Read online

  “Well, yeah, what about it? So I’m a nutter, too.”

  “My visit today is simply to warn you that little Ludovic has an abnormal memory for his age — abnormal for any age, really. He recited the Chaix timetable from memory. Ten pages. He multiplied a fourteen-digit number by another one just as long.”

  “Well, so with him it’s numbers. I guess he’s not troubled with the historical memory. Maybe that’ll keep him away from the firing squad, next time.”

  “Next time? What next time?”

  “How am I supposed to know that? But there always is a next one.”

  “You should have him examined by a doctor.”

  “Listen, Herbier. You’re pushing it, now. If my nephew were truly abnormal, he’d be an imbecile. Good day, and thank you for your visit. I understand you’re saying this with the best of intentions. Tell me, is he as gifted at history as he is at mathematics?”

  “I’m telling you, Ambrose, you can’t call it a gift — or even intelligence. Intelligence implies reason. I’ll repeat that: reasoning. And in that department he’s no better or worse than any other kid his age. As for French history, he can recite every bit of it, from A to Z.”

  There was an even longer silence, and then suddenly I heard my uncle bawl, “To Z? What Z? Because there’s already a Z in sight?”

  Monsieur Herbier had nothing to say to that. After the defeat in 1940, with the Z hovering distinctly on the horizon, I often found myself thinking back to that conversation.

  The only teacher who did not seem the least bit worried about my “predispositions” was my French teacher, Monsieur Pinder. The one time he got upset with me was when, in an attempt to outdo myself, I took it upon myself to start with the last verse of the José-Maria de Heredia poem “Los Conquistadores” and recite it backward. Monsieur Pinder interrupted me with a menacing shake of his finger. “Young Ludovic,” he warned, “I don’t know if this is your way of preparing for what appears to be threatening us all, by which I mean a backward life in a backward world, but I shall ask you to leave poetry out of it, at the very least.”

  Later on, it was this same Monsieur Pinder who assigned us a composition topic that would play a certain role in my life later on: “Examine and compare these two expressions: to live reasonably and to keep your reason to live. Do you see a contradiction between the two ideas? Explain.”

  It should be acknowledged that Monsieur Herbier was not entirely incorrect when he came to my uncle with his concerns, with his fears that my knack for remembering anything and everything wasn’t accompanied by any growth in maturity, moderation, or plain good sense. Maybe that’s how it is, more or less, for everyone who suffers from an excess of memory — how it turned out for so many Frenchmen a few years later when they were deported, or taken down by the firing squad.

  3

  Our farm was located behind the hamlet of Clos, at the edge of the Voigny woods. Fern and broom crowded together with beech and oak trees there, and deer and boar roamed wild. Farther on there were marshes, where the peace of teal, otters, dragonflies, and swans reigned.

  La Motte was fairly isolated. Our closest neighbors, the Cailleux family, were a good half-hour’s walk away. Little Johnny Cailleux was two years younger than I, so to him, I was “the big boy.” His parents had a dairy in town; the grandfather, Gaston, who had lost a leg in a sawmill accident, kept bees. Further on, there was the Magnard family, a taciturn lot who didn’t care for anything besides cows, butter, and fields. The father, the son, and the daughters, two old maids, never spoke to anyone.

  “Except to tell or ask a price,” Gaston Cailleux would grumble.

  Other than that, the only farms between La Motte and Cléry belonged to the Monniers and the Simons, whose children were in my class at school.

  I knew the surrounding woods all the way down to their smallest, most secret corners. My uncle had helped me build an Indian wigwam, a little hut made of branches and covered in oilcloth, at the bottom of a ravine in a place known as Vieille-Source. I’d slip over there to read the books of James Oliver Curwood and James Fenimore Cooper, and dream of the Apaches and the Sioux, or else, besieged by enemy forces — which, as tradition requires, were always “superior in number” — I would defend myself down to the last bullet cartridge. I was dozing there one day in mid-June, having gorged on wild strawberries, when I opened my eyes to see a very blonde little girl gazing severely at me from beneath a big straw hat. Sun and shadow were dappled beneath the branches, and even today, after so many years, it seems that dark and light have never ceased to play around Lila — that somehow, in this instant of emotion, whose reason and nature I didn’t comprehend, I was forewarned. Instinctively, driven by some unknown inner force or weakness, I made a gesture whose definitive, irrevocable nature I was far from understanding at the time: I held out a handful of strawberries to the severe blonde apparition. I had no idea how much more than that I was offering. The little girl came and sat down beside me, and without paying the least attention to the berries I proffered, took the entire basket. And that was how the roles were dealt, for all time. When there were only a few strawberries left at the bottom of the basket, she handed it back to me and said, with a certain degree of reproach, “They’re better with sugar.”

  There was only one thing to do, and I didn’t hesitate. I leapt up and took off running, fists at my side, through the woods and fields to La Motte, where I shot into the kitchen like a cannonball, grabbed a box of powdered sugar from the shelf, and retraced my steps at the same speed. There she was, sitting in the grass, her hat lying beside her, contemplating a ladybug on the back of her hand. I held the sugar out to her.

  “I don’t want any more. But that’s nice.”

  “We’ll leave the sugar here and come back tomorrow,” I said, with inspiration bred from despair.

  “Maybe. What’s your name?”

  “Ludo. What’s yours?”

  The ladybug flew off.

  “We don’t know each other well enough yet. Maybe someday I’ll tell you my name. I’m pretty mysterious, you know. You’ll probably never see me again. What do your parents do?”

  “I don’t have any parents. I live with my uncle.”

  “What does he do?”

  I sensed vaguely that “rural postman” wasn’t quite the right thing.

  “He’s a kite master.”

  She seemed favorably impressed.

  “What does that mean?”

  “It’s like a great captain, but in the sky.”

  She thought for a little while longer, then got up. “Maybe I’ll come back tomorrow,” she said. “I don’t know. I’m very unpredictable. How old are you?”

  “I’m almost ten.”

  “Oh, you’re far too young for me. I’m eleven and a half. But I like wild strawberries. Wait for me here tomorrow at the same time. I’ll be back if there’s nothing better to do.”

  She left me, after shooting me one last severe look.

  I must have picked six pounds of strawberries the next day. Every few minutes, I ran to see if she was there. She didn’t return that day. Nor the next day, nor the day after that.

  I waited for her every day in June, July, August, and September. At first I had the strawberries to count on, then blueberries, then blackberries, then mushrooms. The only other time waiting would cause me such torment was from 1940 to 1944, keeping watch for France’s return. Even when it came time for the mushrooms to abandon me, too, I kept returning to the forest, to the place we had met. The year passed, and then another and another again, and I discovered that Monsieur Herbier had not been entirely wrong when he warned my uncle that there was something unsettling about my memory. There must have been some kind of hereditary weakness in the Fleury family: we did not possess the soothing ability to forget. I studied, I helped my guardian in the workshop, but rare were the times when a little girl in a white dress d
id not dog me, clutching a big straw hat in her hand. It was indeed an “excess of memory,” as Monsieur Herbier had so rightly pointed out — something that must not have plagued him too much, given how carefully he avoided memory’s dangerous, ardent clamor under the Nazis. Three or four years after our encounter, when the first strawberries appeared, I still found myself filling my basket and stretching out under the beeches with my eyes closed, to encourage her to surprise me. I even remembered the sugar. Of course, as time went by, there was a certain amount of fun in it. I had begun to understand what my uncle called “the pursuit of the blue yonder,” and I was learning not to take myself, or my excess of memory, too seriously.

  4

  I sat for my baccalauréat exams at fourteen, thanks to a “special dispensation” obtained with the help of Monsieur Julliac, the secretary at our town hall, who “adjusted” my birth certificate to make me fifteen. I didn’t yet know what I was going to do with my life. In the meantime, my gift for numbers had led Marcellin Duprat to entrust me with the accounts of the Clos Joli. I worked there twice a week. I read everything I could get my hands on, from medieval fabliaux to works like Henri Barbusse’s Under Fire and Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, both gifts from my uncle — although, with his confidence in “mandatory public education,” he rarely recommended books to me. Beyond that confidence, I believe Ambrose Fleury had a trust even greater in something he seemed to consider a certainty, despite the debate it has provoked before, during, and after: the heredity of acquired traits — above all, he’d add, among “our kind.”

  Several years had passed since my uncle had left his job as a rural postman, but Marcellin Duprat, with no little zeal, advised him to receive visitors in his old uniform. The owner of the Clos Joli had a keen sense of what nowadays we’d call “public relations.”

  “You understand, Ambrose? You’re a legend now. You’ve got to uphold that legend. I know you could care less about it for yourself, but you owe it to your country. My customers are always asking about you: ‘That Fleury, the famous postman with his kites — is he still around? Can we go see him?’ Your whatsits, whatever you call them — I mean, you do sell them, after all. They’re your livelihood. Well, so you have to keep up your name. Someday people will be saying ‘the Postman Fleury’ like they say ‘le Douanier Rousseau.’ Look at me, when I come out to greet customers, I keep my chef’s hat and jacket on. Because that’s how they want to see me.”

  Although Marcellin was an old friend, his little recipe didn’t please my uncle one bit. They had a few first-rate shouting matches over it. The owner of the Clos Joli saw himself as something of a national treasure, and the only people in his field he would acknowledge as equals were Point in Vienne, Pic in Valence, and Dumaine in Saulieu. He had a stately presence: a faintly receding hairline, clear, steel-blue eyes, and a little mustache that gave him a haughty, authoritarian air. There was something military in his bearing, perhaps acquired during his years in the trenches of the Great War. In the thirties, it had not yet occurred to France to retreat into its culinary grandeur, and Marcellin Duprat deemed himself its unsung hero.

  “The only man who understands me is Édouard Herriot. The other day, as he was leaving, he said to me, ‘Every time I come here is a comfort. I can’t say what the future holds for us, but I’m sure the Clos Joli will survive it all. The only thing is, Marcellin, you’re going to have to wait awhile for your Legion of Honor Medal. The abundance of cultural riches we still enjoy in France makes us neglect some of our more modest values.’ That’s what Herriot said to me. So do me a favor, Ambrose. You and I are the only famous people around here. Please, every so often, for the sake of the customers, if you’d just put on your postman’s uniform — I promise, you’ll look a hell of a lot better than in those hick corduroys.”

  In the end, my uncle couldn’t help but laugh. I was always happy when I saw those nice little wrinkles — the kind that live off merriment — appear on his face.

  “Good old Marcellin! All that grandeur can weigh heavy on a man’s shoulders. But you know what? He’s not all wrong. Popularizing the peaceful art of kite-making is worth sacrificing a little pride for.”

  I don’t think it actually bothered my uncle all that much to button up his old postman’s uniform when he went out into the fields surrounded by children, two or three of whom came regularly to La Motte for “practice” after school.

  As I mentioned, Ambrose Fleury had been elected honorary president of the Order of the Kites of France, and God knows why he resigned from it after Munich. I never did understand how it was that an ardent pacifist could feel so indignant, so beaten, the day that peace — shameful as some people said it was — was kept at Munich. No doubt it was the old Fleury historical memory flaring up again.

  My own memory wasn’t letting up any, either. Every summer, I returned to the forest and remembered. I asked around and learned that I had not been the victim of some kind of “apparition,” as I had occasionally begun to fear was the case. Elisabeth de Bronicka really did exist; her parents owned Le Manoir des Jars, an estate bordered by the road from Clos to Cléry, whose walls I passed every day on the way to school. They hadn’t been back to Normandy for several summers. From my uncle, I learned that they had their mail forwarded to Poland, to their estate on the shores of the Baltic, not far from the Free City of Gdańsk, better known back then as Danzig. No one knew if they were ever coming back.

  “This isn’t the first kite you’ve lost in your life, Ludo,” my uncle would remind me when he saw me returning from the woods with my basket of strawberries still disconsolately full. “And it won’t be the last, either.”

  By that point, I hoped for nothing more. Even though my game had become a bit childish for a boy of fourteen, I had before me the example of a grown man who’d succeeded in preserving in himself the scrap of naïveté that turns into wisdom only when it ages badly.

  It had been nearly four years since I’d seen “my Polish girl,” as I called her, but my memory had held up perfectly. The finely sculpted features of her face made you want to cup it in the palm of your hand, and the harmonious vivacity of her every movement got me excellent marks on my philosophy finals. I had chosen aesthetics as the subject of my exams, and the examiner, who I imagine was worn out after a long day’s work, said: “I shall ask you only one question: What characterizes grace?”

  I thought of the Polish girl — her neck, her arms, her floating hair — and did not hesitate: “Motion.”

  He gave me nineteen points out of twenty. I owe my baccalauréat to love.

  Aside from Johnny Cailleux, who would occasionally come sit in a corner and watch me, a little sadly — “at least you have somebody,” he said to me one day with envy — I had no real ties to anyone. I had become almost as indifferent to my surroundings as the Magnard family. I would run into them from time to time, the father, the son, and the two daughters, clutching their crates as they lurched down the path in their cart on the way to market. I said hello every time, and they never answered.

  Early July 1936 found me sitting in the grass with my basket of strawberries, reading José-Maria de Heredia, whose poems still seem to me to have been quite unjustly forgotten. In front of me, in a tunnel of light between two beeches, sunshine rolled over the ground like a voluptuous cat. From time to time, a titmouse fled from the nearby marsh.

  I lifted my eyes. There she was before me, a girl whom the past four years had treated with a piety that was like a tribute to my memory. My heart leapt from my chest and clutched at my throat. I froze.

  And then the emotion passed.

  Calmly, I laid down my book.

  She had been a little late in returning, that was all.

  “I hear you’ve been waiting for four years to see me …” She laughed. “You didn’t even forget the sugar!”

  “I never forget anything.”

  “I forget everything so eas
ily. I don’t even recall your name.”

  I let her play with me. If she knew I had been looking for her everywhere, then she had to know who I was.

  “Wait … Let me think … Oh yes. It’s Ludovic. Ludo. The son of Ambrose Fleury, the famous postman.”

  “His nephew.” I held out the basket of strawberries. She tasted one, sat down beside me, and picked up my book.

  “My God. José-Maria de Heredia! That’s so unfashionable. You should read Rimbaud and Apollinaire.”

  There was only one thing to do. I recited:

  She he once called his Angevin sweet

  O’er trembling chords erred spirit fleet

  As love’s anguish struck her heart; in pain

  Her voice cried to the winds that lured him away

  To caress him; perchance his fickle heart swayed

  With his song, made for a thresher of grain.

  She appeared flattered, and pleased with herself.

  “Our gardeners told me that you came and asked questions about whether I was ever coming back. Crazy in love, or something.”

  I saw that I’d be lost if I didn’t stand up for myself. “You know, sometimes the best way to forget about someone is to see them again.”

  “Hang on a second, don’t get all worked up, I was only teasing. Is it true, what they say — that you’re all like that?”

  “Like what?”

  “That you don’t forget?”

  “My uncle Ambrose claims the Fleurys have such good memories that some of them even died from it.”

  “How can you die from memory? That’s ridiculous.”

  “That’s what he thinks, too — it’s why he hates war and became a rural postman. He’s only interested in kites, now. They’re beautiful when they’re in the sky, but at least you can stick a string to them, and even when they get away from you and crash, it’s just paper and bits of wood.”