The Kites Read online

  I knew there were many Polish aviators in the RAF’s squadrons, but it was the first time any of them had been picked up by the Resistance. Tad, I thought. It was absurd; there really was no chance of it being him, given the thing we sometimes so tragically call “probability distribution.” Hope often plays these kinds of tricks on us, but then again, those are the tricks we live off of. My heart beat wildly; I stopped for a moment and gave André Cailleux an imploring look, as if it were up to him.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s him,” I said.

  “Who’s that?”

  I didn’t answer. In the forest a half mile beyond the farm was a shed where the Rieux stored wood for the winter; a hundred yards from that, we had dug an underground passage that led to a weapons cache, which also served as a hideout for wanted comrades, or for the aviators we’d managed to pick up. Its outside entrance was hidden beneath a pile of dead wood. We moved away the logs and the branches; lifting the trapdoor, we descended into the passageway, which led for twenty-odd yards to the hideout. It was very dark; I lit my flashlight; the aviator was sleeping on a mattress, under a blanket; I could just make out the “Poland” insignia on the sleeve of his gray battle dress, and his hair. That was all I needed. But the idea seemed so impossible to me, so insane, that I bounded toward the sleeper, and, pulling away the blanket, shone my flashlight in his face.

  I hovered over him, holding one end of the blanket, utterly convinced that, yet again, my cursed memory was rekindling the past.

  It wasn’t an illusion.

  Bruno, gentle Bruno, so maladroit, always lost in his musical daydreams, was there, in front of me, in his English aviator’s uniform.

  I didn’t have the strength to move. It was Cailleux who shook him awake.

  Bruno rose slowly. He didn’t recognize me, in the dark. It was only when I shone the bright beam of the flashlight in my own face that I heard him murmur: “Ludo!”

  He embraced me. I couldn’t even return the hug. All of my hope was knotted in my throat. If Bruno had managed to make it to England, then Lila must be there, too. Finally, I asked, in a terrified voice, for this time I risked knowing: “Where is Lila?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know, Ludo. I don’t know.”

  There was such pity and tenderness in his eyes that I grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him: “Tell me the truth! What happened to her? Don’t try to spare me.”

  “Calm down. I don’t know, I have no idea. I left Poland a few days after you, to go to that piano competition in England. In Edinburgh. Maybe you remember …”

  “I remember everything.”

  “I got to England two weeks before the war. Since then I’ve done everything I could to find news … Like you, I guess … I haven’t succeeded.”

  He had trouble speaking and lowered his head. “But I know she’s alive … that she’ll come back. You, too — don’t you?”

  “Yes, she’ll come back.”

  For the first time, he smiled. “Actually, she’s never left us …”

  “Never.”

  He’d kept his right hand on my shoulder, and little by little, this fraternal touch calmed me. I saw the ribbons decorating his chest.

  “My, my!”

  “What can you do,” he said. “You change, sometimes, when disaster hits. It can even turn a pacifist daydreamer into a man of action. As soon as the war started I joined the English air force. I became a fighter pilot.”

  He hesitated, and then said, a little abashedly, as if he were lacking in modesty: “I’ve racked up seven victories. Yep, old Ludo, the time for music is over and done with.”

  “It’ll come back.”

  “Not for me.”

  He withdrew his hand from my shoulder and raised it. There was a prosthesis fixed to it: two fingers were missing. He looked at it with a smile.

  “Another one of Lila’s dreams bites the dust,” he said. “You remember? The next Horowitz, the next Rubinstein …”

  “And you can fly a plane with that?”

  “Oh, just fine. I brought home four victories with that … But what I’ll do with my life afterward … that’s a whole different question. The war will keep going for a while yet, so maybe it’s one I won’t need to ask myself.”

  We stayed together for two days. With excellent German paperwork procured for us by Lady Esterhazy’s daughter, we took a few risks, including lunch at the Clos Joli. Marcellin Duprat’s face when he saw the “young prodigy,” as he had called Bruno, was for me one of the restaurant’s tastiest delicacies, an unplanned addition to the chef’s menu. His expression was one of astonishment and pleasure — and a healthy dose of fear, as he eyed the German officers and the chief of the Evreux Milice, who were seated at a table in the “rotunda.”

  “Oh. It’s you,” was all he managed to say.

  “Squadron leader Bronicki has seven victories to his name,” I said, not really trying to be quiet.

  “Shut up, stupid,” Duprat growled, attempting to guard his smile.

  “He’s returning to England to continue the struggle,” I added, raising my voice.

  I couldn’t really tell whether the good Marcellin was smiling or showing his teeth. “Don’t just stand there, for God’s sake. Come with me.”

  He dragged us “portside” as he called it, seating us at the least visible table in the room. “All crazies, those Fleurys,” he grumbled.

  “If there were no madness, Monsieur Duprat, France would have thrown in the towel a long time ago. You first of all.”

  We didn’t talk about Lila anymore. She was there with us, so present that mentioning her would only have pushed her away. Bruno spoke to me of his admiration for England, and told me about life among these people who were going to win the war because in 1940 they hadn’t been willing to admit they’d lost it.

  “And they’ve kept up their kindness and good cheer. Not even a trace of animosity for the foreigners we all are, even the ones who can’t help sleeping with their sisters and the wives of the English soldiers fighting overseas. And the French, how are they?”

  “They’re pulling themselves back together. It was a real punch in the gut for us; it took time.”

  Marcellin Duprat came circling around twice during the meal, looking both worried and a little guilty.

  We ate poularde en vessie, sauce Fleurette.

  “You see I’m holding firm,” he said to Bruno.

  “It’s very good. As good as before. Bravo.”

  “Tell them, over there. They can come. I’ll take care of them.”

  “I’ll tell them.”

  “But don’t drag it out too much …”

  Maybe he meant the meal, maybe he meant the war — we had to give him the benefit of the doubt.

  The second time he appeared, he looked prudently in all directions, then asked Bruno, “And your family? Have you heard anything?”

  “No.”

  Duprat sighed and moved off.

  After lunch, we made our leisurely way to La Motte. My uncle was standing in front of the farmhouse, smoking his pipe. He showed no surprise when he saw it was Bruno.

  “Well, everything happens,” he said, “which proves that dreamers sometimes do have the last word. Not all daydreams crash and burn.”

  I told him that Bruno had become a pilot in England, that he had notched up seven victories with his plane, and that in a couple of weeks he’d be back in the air again, fighting. As they shook hands, my uncle must have felt the two steel fingers of the prosthesis: he shot Bruno a quick, pained look. After which he was overcome by a fit of coughing, bringing tears to his eyes.

  “I smoke too much,” he grumbled.

  Bruno asked to see the gnamas, and my uncle brought him to the workshop, where several children were busy with paper and pots of glue.

  “You’ve
already seen them all,” Ambrose Fleury said. “I’m not making any new ones right now, just sticking to the old. These days, we need memory more than innovation. And we can’t fly them any more. The Germans don’t give them enough height. First they limited us to a hundred feet, then fifty, and now they’re all but demanding that I teach my kites to crawl. They’re afraid they might serve as orientation markers for Allied aviators when they’re in the sky, or maybe some kind of coded message to the Resistance. They’re not entirely wrong, really.”

  He coughed for quite a while again, uncomfortably, and Bruno rushed to answer his unspoken question: “Unfortunately, I have no news of my family. But I’m not worried about Lila. She’ll be back.”

  “We’re all entirely certain of that here,” my uncle said, glancing over at me.

  We stayed at La Motte for another hour, and my guardian asked Bruno to contact Lord Howe and send a message of friendship and gratitude from Ambrose Fleury to the members of the Order of the Kites of England, to whom the “Cléry chapter” sent a fraternal salute.

  “It’s extraordinary how they stood firm, all alone, in 1940.”

  And then he came out with this slightly comical phrase, which surprised me, coming from such a modest man: “I’m happy to have been useful for something,” he said.

  Bruno set off on the escape route to Spain that very evening, and two weeks later we received a “personal message” from the BBC confirming his arrival in England: “The virtuoso has returned to his piano.” Our encounter had shaken me deeply. It was like a first sign of the end of the impossible, the promise of another return. I couldn’t help seeing a benevolent signal from God in this breach in probability distribution. Unbeliever that I was, I thought of God frequently — now, more than ever, it was a time when man needed to keep all his most beautiful creations around him. As I’ve said before, as if in apology, that while being so preoccupied by all the things I was doing to hasten her return, I felt Lila’s physical presence by my side less and less often. But even that I took as a good sign, like when she’d stopped writing to me from Gródek, because our reunion was so imminent. I lived in the premonition of this imminence. It seemed to me that at any moment, the door might open and … It was only an incantation. All it changed was my relationship with doors. Becoming more sure of her survival, I didn’t need to invent her anymore, and contented myself with memory. I recalled our walks on the shores of the Baltic, when Lila dreamed of herself with so much frustration and fervor.

  “The only way I can make it is to write something amazing. No woman has ever yet written War and Peace. Maybe that’s what I should do …”

  “Tolstoy already wrote it.”

  “Stop it, Ludo! Every time I try to do something with my life, you hold me back! Goddammit!”

  “Personally, Lila, I have no ambition to become the first woman Tolstoy, but —”

  “Oh, sarcasm, now! That’s just what we needed!”

  I laughed. I was almost happy. From my memory I drew the strength, as Ambrose Fleury put it, “that the French need to pull the sun up over the horizon.”

  35

  With sabotages becoming more frequent, the Germans began to see “enemy agents” everywhere, an obsession comparable to the hysteria over spying that overcame the French in 1939–40. The occupier tightened its embrace and even Duprat was hassled. This despite the fact that Grüber, the head of the Gestapo in Normandy, was a frequent customer of the Clos Joli. I believe that what interested him more than anything was the relationship between the Wehrmacht’s senior officers and the French.

  Grüber was a thickset man with pallid skin and dirty blond hair cut close to his ears. From time to time I would observe him tasting the restaurant’s delicacies, and be struck by his attitude, which was attentive and contemptuous all at once. The looks on the faces of certain Germans, the highly cultivated ones, such as General von Tiele or Otto Abetz, were expressions of admiration mixed with profound satisfaction, as if, having conquered France, they had come to our table in order to savor its peerless uniqueness. For many Germans, then as now, I think that France was and remains a place for delectation, meant entirely for that. All of this is to say that I was accustomed to the whole spectrum of expressions with which our conquerors savored even a simple coq au vin or a cassolette duchesse. As for what was actually going through their heads, I had no idea. Perhaps it was a kind of symbolic rite, not all that different from the rites of the great dead civilizations of the Incas or the Aztecs, in which the victor tore out the heart of the vanquished and ate it in order to possess his soul and spirit. But the face Grüber made as he chewed was very different from what I was used to observing: it contained, as I have said, the skeptical and slightly disdainful — or at any rate sardonic — awareness of a man who was not easily intimidated.

  It was Lucien Duprat who put his finger on it: “Look at him. He’s investigating. He wants to know what’s in it.”

  That was exactly it. I think a lot of Germans stationed in France during the Occupation were asking themselves that question.

  And yet it was hard to understand how a man as uncultivated as Grüber could be so fascinated by the Clos Joli. Duprat’s expression — “he senses the enemy” — did not seem to line up with the man’s unsophisticated nature, especially since he never missed an opportunity to say how “decadent” the restaurant was.

  Marcellin Duprat didn’t trouble himself much over Grüber, despite the fact that he was the one making sure that the Clos Joli was kept supplied, in total disregard of all the regulations at that time. Duprat knew he was protected from high up, and, to be sure, the Germans had been trying to accommodate the French elites and assure their cooperation since the beginning of the Occupation. For Duprat, the explanation for this policy was simple: the talk among leaders of the Third Reich was of “building Europe,” and they were trying hard to show that within this Europe, France would occupy the place that was rightfully hers. But even supposing that Grüber did have strict instructions regarding the restaurant, and was respecting them in spite of himself, this did little to explain the spiteful and almost hateful air with which he ate his boudin d’huîtres, as if hidden inside it was some kind of challenge to his Nazi faith. According to Duprat, who would observe him occasionally with a quietly mocking air, he behaved like a man who was being defeated on the Russian and Western Fronts all at once.

  All that notwithstanding, it came as a surprise to everyone when, on March 2, 1942, with total disregard of all the orders about “collaboration,” he arrested Marcellin Duprat. The restaurant was closed for eight days, and the affair took on such proportions that after the war they found indignant telegrams from Otto Abetz to Berlin, including this one, cited by Sterner: “The führer himself has given orders that major landmarks of French history be respected.”

  Duprat returned from his week in prison furious and somewhat proud — “I stood up to them, and that’s that” — but he refused to tell us what had led Grüber to question and detain him. In Cléry, it was rumored to have something to do with the black market, some sort of hike in the price of palm-greasing that Marcellin had balked at. There was also the fact that Duprat was protected by von Tiele — relations between the Nazis and the Wehrmacht “caste” were at that time deteriorating rapidly. Personally, I was convinced that Grüber had wanted to remind everyone who was really in charge at the Clos Joli.

  My uncle seemed to have another idea entirely. I never knew whether the good turn he did for his pal Marcellin was deliberate or not — he did like a good laugh. Maybe he’d simply had one glass too many with his friends at the bar of the Petit-Gris when he tossed out to them: “They questioned that old Marcellin for days. He stood firm.”

  “But what did they want from him?” demanded Monsieur Meunier, the owner.

  “The recipe, doggone it!”

  There was a long silence. At the bar that night, in addition to the owner, was Gaston Cailleux,
our neighbor, along with Antoine Vaille, the one whose son’s name is now on the war monument.

  “What recipe?” Monsieur Meunier inquired, at length.

  “The recipe,” my uncle repeated. “The Krauts wanted to know what’s in it: lapereau du fermier au vinaigre de framboise, blanc de volaille cathédrale de Chartres — the whole damn menu. And that old devil wouldn’t talk. Even under torture — they tried their worst, even the bathtub — but he stood firm. He wouldn’t even let slip the recipe for his panade aux trois sauces. Kids, some folks will fold after the first wallop, but not our Marcellin. They nearly killed him, but he wouldn’t say a word.”

  The three old men laughed. My uncle didn’t even have to wink at them.

  “Personally,” said Cailleux, “I was sure that old national treasure wouldn’t talk. The recipe of the Clos Joli is sacred. God almighty, that sure is something, isn’t it?”

  “We all feel it,” said Vaille.

  The owner refilled their glasses.

  “Got to let people know,” murmured my uncle.

  “And how!” Vaille roared. “Your grandchildren will tell their grandchildren, they will. And on down the line.”

  “Right on down the line,” Cailleux agreed. “It’s the least we can do for him.”

  “Have to do what it takes,” my uncle concluded.

  As you may recall, the story of the great French chef who refused to give his recipes to the Germans, even under torture, was published in September 1945 in the Stars and Stripes, the American Armed Forces’ newspaper. It made a big splash in America. When they asked Marcellin Duprat for his own thoughts on the matter, he shrugged. “They say all kinds of things. What can be said is that I represented something the Nazis couldn’t stand: an invincible France that was going to pull through yet again. That’s all. So they tried to give me a rough time. But as for the rest … I’m telling you, it’s nonsense.”