The Kites Page 5

  Most of these Parisian personages knew nothing of my uncle, but nodded knowingly so as not to be caught red-handed in some monstrous ignorance. The elegance of their dress astounded me; an intimidating pageant of jewels, hats, jackets, spats, and suits equaled only in what I had seen on the backs of the customers at the Clos Joli; I felt uneasy there with my worn-down shoes, my shiny jacket sleeves, the beret sticking out of my pocket. I battled my feelings of inferiority bravely, picking out a guest and imagining him floating in the air at the end of a line I held in my hand, with his stiff-legged trousers, his checked vest, and his yellow tie, propelled this way or that with a flick of my hand. It was the first time I had wielded my imagination as a weapon of defense, and nothing ever turned out to be more beneficial to me in this life. To be sure, the beginnings of social awareness were still far off for me at this point, but all the same, I was engaging in a kind of protest that, without blowing anything out of proportion, smacked ever so slightly of subversion, if not revolution. When it came time for a corpulent gentleman by the name of Oustric, whose smoothly hairless face, powerfully endowed with fat, sheltered a round baby nose perched above plump little lips, to learn from Lila that I was the nephew of “the celebrated Ambrose Fleury,” he shook my hand as he told me, “I congratulate you. France could use a lot more men like your uncle.”

  I caught the flash of mischief on Lila’s face that I had begun to know well.

  “You know,” she said, “they’re talking about appointing him minister of the postal service in the next government.”

  “A great man! A great man!” Monsieur Oustric hastened to affirm, inclining his torso slightly toward the petit four already in reach of his lips.

  I felt a sudden desire to deliver the little cake from its impending fate. Among all these bigwigs, who made me feel as if I’d been reduced to dust, it seemed to me that if I wished to affirm my existence in the eyes of my beloved, my only possible course of action was some sort of crazy feat.

  Delicately, I withdrew the petit four from Monsieur Oustric’s chubby hand and brought it to my own lips. It took almost everything I had, my heart was pounding — not yet did I equal my Fleury forefather finding death on the barricades in 1870, not yet was I charging into Berlin with my troops to dazzle Lila as I locked Hitler away, but at least for now I was showing her what I was made of.

  When Monsieur Oustric saw the petit four disappear into my mouth, the look of stupor that appeared on his face was such that I suddenly measured the true boldness of my exploit. More dead than alive, for I hadn’t yet forged the strength of character of a true revolutionary, I turned to Lila. In return I received a little look of amused tenderness. She took my hand, pulled me behind a screen, and kissed me.

  “What you did is very Polish, you know. We are a nation of daredevils. You would have made a splendid Imperial Guardsman under Napoleon and you would have ended up a field marshal. I’m sure you’ll do great things in life. I’ll help you.”

  I decided to test her. I wanted to know if she loved me for who I was or only for all the feats I would accomplish for her. “You know, as soon as I’m old enough, I hope I’ll be able to get a nice position as a clerk in the postal administration.”

  She nodded her head and stroked my cheek in an almost maternal fashion.

  “You don’t know me,” she said, as if I had been talking about her life and not my own. “Come.”

  A few of the most gleaming personalities in the who’s who of the upper crust of the time were present that day at the Bronickis’, but their names were as unknown to me as my uncle’s was to them. Only one man among them showed a friendly interest in me. It was a famous aviator, Corniglion-Molinier, who had just failed in a highly courageous manner in his attempt to fly from Paris to Australia, in the company of the English Mollison. The Gazette had gratified the failure with the following attempt at commentary: “Mollison and Molinier will never make a hit!” He was a short southerner with languorous eyes rimmed with long, almost feminine eyelashes, and when Lila introduced me with her obligatory, “He is the nephew of the celebrated Ambrose Fleury,” Corniglion-Molinier replied amusedly, “Your uncle gave me one of his kites after my failure, I’m not sure if it was to encourage me to change careers …”

  Having made my tour of the sitting room in this manner I was finally able to join the other young people in the next room, around a table attended by a white-gloved waiter. I hardly touched the pastries, ices, creams, and exotic fruit, all presented on silver platters marked with the vermeil she-wolf of the Bronicki coat of arms. This atmosphere of luxury and elegance made me all the more uneasy because I had been seated across from Lila’s cousin, Hans von Schwede. My fragile yet intrepid woodland attacker held himself very straight, keeping his elbow pinned at his side as he lifted his cup of tea, his legs crossed. His hair was almost as blond and long as Lila’s, and his face had a fineness to it that I would not yet have known to qualify as aristocratic at that phase of my life, still being unschooled in the rapport between the word and its aesthetic. He showed no hostility toward me and at no moment did he try through any sort of mockery to gain advantage over me through the difference in our appearances — between his silver-buttoned blazer and white flannel trousers and my old ill-fitting suit, which could not have gone worse with my current company. He simply acted as if I weren’t there, and I consoled myself by noting the incontestable marks of my existence on his face: a slightly swollen lip and a black eye. Distractedly, he was sculpting his black-currant sorbet into the shape of a rose with his dessert spoon. Tad cast cold looks at the guests of this raout, a word that was living out its last years of use in the French language. The thinness of his lips had an easy affinity with what I would, a good many years later, come to describe as “terrorist irony,” whose traces I recognized in Houdon’s famous sculpture of Voltaire. With one arm dangled over the back of his chair, he observed the tables around which the Bronickis’ guests embodied to perfection the high tone of the nineteen thirties, when the Azure Coast was not a thing in summer because its hotels still only opened for the winter season, and Cabourg had not yet acquired the “old fashioned charm” that ennobles the poor taste of the past. As for Bruno, he sat peacefully among us, always a little hunched, always a little absent, crouched in the underbrush of his tangled curls, which, though he was only sixteen, were already shot with a few strands of gray. He had one of those very gentle faces that seem made for maturity, which stands ready for its snowfall even in the springtime of youth. The three boys had risen as Lila approached; she had seated me beside her. I remember feeling horribly conscious of my too-short trousers, which left my ankles bare above my socks. And that was how, on that memorable afternoon in the last days of July 1935, we all ended up together for the first time, and in my memory not a single one of the tutti-frutti ices, pastries, or other sweet things will ever melt or turn.

  “Observe,” Tad said, “the hopeless battle of the couturiers, the tailors, the beauticians, and the hairdressers against the blandness, the vulgarity of soul, and the intellectual poverty of society’s best here. And their song matches their fancy feathers: I’ll bet they’re all warbling on about the stock market, horse racing, and gala evenings, while at this very moment civil war is spreading across Spain, Mussolini is gassing the Ethiopians, and Hitler’s demanding Austria and the Sudetenland. That very thin man, the one with a title to a case of baldness — his head would remind you of an ostrich egg if El Greco hadn’t ennobled it by painting it into The Burial of the Count of Orgaz — he’s no Spanish grandee; he’s a usurer who lends to my father at 20 percent interest … The man in the gray jacket and waistcoat is a lawyer with access to every minister of the cabinet — with his wife as his calling card. As for our dear parents, I shudder to think what would become of them if our family tree didn’t offer them such good cover. The aristocratic air would go right out of my father, he’d be taken for a butcher; and if my mother stopped being able to afford Miss
Chanel, Antoine the hairdresser, Julien the masseur, Fernande the beautician, and Nino the gigolo, she’d start to resemble a myopic chambermaid who’s lost her iron …”

  Lila nibbled at an éclair. “Tad is an anarchist,” she explained.

  “Which means he’s a born elitist,” Hans remarked.

  I was pleased to note that he had a German accent. Since France and Germany were hereditary enemies, I felt that, whatever the motive behind his aggression, I had done right in giving him a thrashing.

  Bruno looked pained. “Tad, it seems to me that you have at least as many prejudices as you’re attributing to these people. You can do the exact same thing with nature: you can say that birds look stupid, that dogs are foul because they lick their own rear ends, that there’s nothing stupider than a honeybee when you count up how many hours they’ve spent making honey for everyone else. Watch out. First it’s a way of looking at the world, then it becomes a way of life. Seeing everything as twisted gives you crooked vision.”

  Tad turned to me. “That, young sir, is the voice of a juicy pear whose purpose in life is to be eaten. It’s what they call an idealist.”

  “I’d like to know why you’ve suddenly turned all formal with our friend,” Lila demanded.

  “Because he isn’t yet my friend, if indeed he ever becomes one. At seventeen, I no longer throw myself body and soul into friendships — or anything else, for that matter. I may be Polish, but ‘body and soul’ is not my forte. It was all well and good for our ancestors in the Imperial Guard — those righteous asses had it in them.”

  “I’ll ask you not to use that kind of language in the presence of a young lady,” Hans shot out at him.

  “There you go, the Prussian Junker’s awake now,” Tad sighed. “Which reminds me, where did you get your face all done up like that? In a duel?”

  “Fighting over my pretty face,” Lila declared. “They’re both madly in love with me, but instead of realizing that it should bind them together as brothers, they beat each other up. They’ll get over it when they figure out I love them both, so I won’t be playing favorites.”

  I still hadn’t said anything. I felt, however, that the moment had arrived to make myself known in one way or another; I couldn’t forget that I was the nephew of Ambrose Fleury and therefore came by it honestly. I was not versed in the art of scintillating socially, despite my ardent wish to make a demonstration then and there of something exceptionally superior in Lila’s eyes, something that would leave them all gaping. Had there been any justice in the world, I would’ve been granted the power to fly on the spot, or had a lion bestowed upon me so that I could face it down and vanquish it, or been deposited in a ring with Lila seated at its edge while I won the title of all-weight champion. But the only thing I could do was ask, “What is the square root of 273,678?”

  I must say that at least I succeeded in surprising them. The three boys stared at me fixedly, then exchanged a few glances with one another. Lila seemed enchanted. She had a horror of mathematics, as she found that numbers had the annoying habit of proclaiming that two and two are four, which to her seemed somehow contrary to the very spirit of Poland.

  “Well, since you don’t know, I’ll tell you,” I declared. “It’s 523.14242!”

  “I presume that you memorized that before coming here,” Hans said disdainfully. “I call that taking precautions. Incidentally, I have nothing against showmen sawing women in half or pulling rabbits out of hats, it’s a living … if that’s what you need to do.”

  “Well, pick a number yourself, then,” I answered, “and I’ll tell you its square root straightaway. Or any multiplication problem. Or, well, give me a list of a hundred numbers and I’ll repeat it in the order you gave it to me.”

  “What’s the square root of 7,198,489?” Tad asked.

  It took me a few seconds more than usual, because I was feeling emotional: it was a matter of life and death.

  “Two thousand, six hundred and eighty-three,” I proclaimed.

  Hans shrugged. “What the good in that? We can’t check him.”

  But Tad had pulled a notebook and pencil from his pocket and did the calculation. “Correct,” he said.

  Lila applauded. “I told you he was a genius,” she declared. “It was actually obvious even without that utterly unnecessary mental math exercise. I don’t choose just anyone.”

  “It’ll have to be looked into a bit more closely,” Tad murmured. “But I admit I’m interested. Perhaps he’ll agree to submit to a few more challenges.”

  It was hard, but I made it through without a single mistake. For half an hour, they recited lists of figures to me and I repeated them back from memory, produced the square roots of interminably long numbers, and answered multiplication problems so astronomical they could have turned the solar system green with envy. Not only did I succeed in convincing my audience of what my friend called my “powers,” but in the end, Lila got up from the table, went and found her father, and informed him that I was a mathematical wunderkind who merited his attention. Count Bronicki came to see me immediately; he must have thought that somewhere in the depths of my brain slumbered a winning combination that only needed awakening to achieve triumph at roulette, baccarat, and the stock market. He was a deep believer in miracles — in the form of money. I was forthwith invited to stand at the center of the sitting room, before an audience that included some of the era’s biggest wheelers and dealers, people with an irresistible attraction to numbers. Never before had I engaged in mental calculations with such a desperate desire for victory. To be sure, no one in the family had ever called me a peasant, nor had I ever been made to feel my social inferiority: the aristocratic bloodline of the Bronicki family was so old that they had come to feel toward the popular classes the attraction and melancholy-tinged nostalgia that inaccessibility inspires. But just imagine a boy of fifteen, raised in the Normandy countryside, wearing too-short trousers and a faded shirt, his beret in his pocket, surrounded by half a hundred ladies and gentlemen dressed with a kind of splendor that seemed to me to indicate their place in a world that, to quote Ravachol — though I wouldn’t have known to do so at the time — “can be made accessible only by ending it.” Imagine all this and you’ll understand the feverish excitement, the anxiety with which I threw myself into this battle for honor. I have lived long enough to find myself in a world where the term “fighting for honor” has ceased to evoke anything but the absurd panache of a bygone era, barely worthy of jest. But all this means is that the world went one way and I another, and it’s not my place to decide which one of us took the wrong turn.

  Standing on the gleaming parquet, one foot forward, my arms crossed over my chest, my face ablaze, I multiplied, divided, found the square roots of enormous numbers, and recited from memory some hundred telephone numbers that were read aloud to me from the telephone book, my head high beneath the strafe of figures, until Lila, worried, came to my rescue. She seized my hand and cried out to the audience in a voice trembling with anger, “That’s enough! You’re exhausting him.”

  She dragged me to the office behind the sideboard, where the Bronickis’ maid busied herself with reinforcements of layer cakes, ices, and sorbets that had just been sent over from the Clos Joli. I did not know why, but although I had emerged victorious from this showdown, I felt defeated and humiliated. It was Tad, as he appeared with Bruno from behind the velvet curtain that separated us from the fancy folk, who provided the explanation for my unease.

  “Please forgive us, my friend,” he said. “My little sister should have known that our father would never miss an opportunity to entertain his guests. You’ve got quite an unusual gift there. Do try not to become a circus dog.”

  “Pay no attention to Tad,” instructed Lila, who, to my horror, was smoking a cigarette. “Like all very intelligent boys, he can’t stand genius. It’s just envy. Really, dear brother, with a sense of humor like that you should
take up meteorology — you just love to rain on people’s parades!”

  Tad kissed her on the forehead. “I love you. Too bad you’re my sister!”

  “I’m only her cousin, so perhaps I’ve got a chance!” called out a voice whose German accent I recognized instantly.

  There was Hans, holding a bottle of port. I’d been having some difficulty shaking off my nervous tension, but the sight of that face, all blondness and fine features, fully returned me to my senses. I already knew that it was him or me, and, since he had been drinking, and was looking me up and down defiantly, I set about wishing for war to break out immediately between France and Germany, so that fate could decide it for us. I detested his affected elegance, his stiffness, that hand in his pocket, that elbow against his side — he might well have been the descendant of Teutonic conquerors and Baltic barons, but for all his pretensions I’d managed to thrash him single-handedly.

  “Nice little number you’ve got there, Monsieur Fleury,” he said. “You’ve got a great future ahead of you.”

  “Don’t be so formal,” Lila protested. “We’ll all be friends …”

  “You have a lovely career ahead of you, Monsieur Fleury,” Hans repeated. “No doubt about it: numbers are the future. The world’s been learning to count since the days of chivalry ended and it’s only going to get worse. We’re about to witness the end of everything that isn’t quantifiable — honor, for example.”

  Tad observed him with a look of amusement. Lila’s brother had an almost physical gift for nonchalance: it was as if he were constantly trying to attenuate the excessive, passionate side of his personality with an attitude of detachment, a slightly weary boredom. I sensed that he had a stinging retort at the tip of his tongue, but as I had observed for myself during our two “battles,” Hans was a boy you wanted to spare. At fourteen, he was the youngest of all of us, and the frailest. He was nevertheless being prepared for a military career, as every man in the von Schwede family was. I learned from Lila that there were certain parallels between his destiny and mine, although it wouldn’t have occurred to me to speak of “destiny” in relation to the Fleurys — the word “fate” was the only one I had heard when it came to my own relations. His father had been killed during the Great War, and his mother, like mine, had died shortly after his birth; he had been raised by an aunt in the castle of Kremnitz in Eastern Prussia, just a few miles from the Bronicki estate in Poland.