The Kites Read online

  As we exchanged more or less friendly repartee, Bruno stood off to one side, tapping out an imaginary melody on the edge of a table.

  “Let’s go for a boat ride,” Lila proposed. “It’s going to rain. Maybe there’ll be a storm, lightning … an event!” She lifted her eyes heavenward, which, as is all too often the case, was only the ceiling. “Oh God,” she exclaimed, “give us a nice thunderstorm, and if it’s in your power, how about a volcano to bring all this Norman placidity to a crashing end!”

  Tad put a kindly arm around her. “Little sister, there’s certainly no lack of volcanoes with exotic names in this world, but the fires smoldering in Europe right now are far more dangerous — and they have nothing to do with the insides of the earth, but everything to do with those of men!”

  A few raindrops fell as we reached the pond. It had been designed by Sanders, the great English landscape architect, whose floral triumphs bloomed all over Europe. Lila’s father had spent millions improving the estate, in the hopes of selling it to some dazzled parvenu for five or six times what he’d paid. The Bronickis were never far from the “ultimate” financial catastrophe, as Tad not unhopefully prognosticated; their opulent lifestyle concealed disasters and near desperate situations of the kind only conspicuous consumption is able to dissimulate. As we took the oars, Lila lounged languorously on some cushions. There was just enough rain to testify to the sky’s beneficence in sparing us from a downpour. The clouds had that heaviness that could have won the day with a few gallops, but the wind was in no hurry. The pre-rain birds took it lazily. Far away, you could hear a train whistle, but not too nostalgically — it was only the Paris–Deauville, not enough to evoke long journeys. You had to row carefully to avoid disturbing the water lilies. The water smelled good, of cool and silt, and the insects dropped down in just the right places to set the ripples running. It wasn’t the season for my friends the dragonflies. A fat and foolish bumblebee occasionally clowned up to us. Lila, in her white dress, draped among her oarsmen, hummed a Polish lament, bestowing her gaze on the lucky sky. I was the strongest of the rowers, but she did not seem to pay that any mind, and at any rate I had to match my strokes to the others. We had to watch out for the ever-so-carefully tended branches, to keep all their flowers in place. There was, of course, a cunning little bridge, covered in white lanterns brought specially from Asia. That was the only obvious trace of premeditation — all the other flower beds had been carefully designed to look wild.

  Lila had ceased her song; she was playing with her hair, and her eyes, so blue that it must have been hard on the sky, had taken on a grave expression that always seemed like her tribute to dreaming.

  “I’m not sure I want to be the next Garbo — I don’t want to be the next anything. I don’t know what I’ll do yet, but I’ll be unique. Obviously, the time has passed when a woman could change the face of the world — really you’d have to be a man, and a pitiful one at that, to want to change the face of the world. I won’t be an actress, because an actress only gets to become someone different for the span of an evening, and I need to change all the time, morning to night, there’s nothing more depressing than only being who you are, some small work that’s the result of circumstance … I have a horror of anything once and for all.”

  I rowed, listening religiously to Lila “dreaming of herself,” as Tad put it; Lila crossing the Atlantic solo, like Alain Gerbault; Lila writing novels translated into every language; Lila becoming a lawyer and saving people’s lives with feats of eloquence. That blonde head, reclining on the Oriental cushions among her four oarsmen, had no idea that to me, she already was a creation far more extraordinary and overwhelming than any of those she evoked in her unknowing of herself.

  The heavy odor of stagnant water rose around us each time the oars moved; hirsute grasses caressed my face; from time to time among the bushes appeared false jungle scenes so skillfully imagined that you had to be very levelheaded and indeed bear in mind that it was only an English garden.

  “I can still fail at everything,” Lila was saying, “I’m young enough. When you get old you have less and less opportunity to mess everything up because you run out of time, so you can live an untroubled life and be happy with what you’ve already made a mess of. That’s what they mean by ‘peace of mind.’ But when you’re only sixteen you can still try everything and fail at it all, that’s what they usually call ‘having your future ahead of you.’” Her voice trembled. “Listen, I don’t mean to scare you, but there are times I think I have no talent for anything …”

  We protested volubly. I say “we,” but it was mostly Tad and Bruno predicting her amazing future. She was going to be the next Marie Curie, but even better, in another field entirely, perhaps one that hadn’t even been invented yet. As for me, I hoped — to be sure, a little shamefacedly — that Lila was right: if she had no talent for anything, then I still had a ghost of a chance. But Lila remained inconsolable, and a tear glided slowly down her cheek, stopping in just the right place to gleam. She carefully abstained from wiping it away.

  “I do so want to be someone, too,” she murmured. “I’m surrounded by geniuses. Bruno will have crowds at his feet, everyone knows Tad will be more famous than Sven Hedin as an explorer, and even Ludo has an astonishing gift for memory …”

  I swallowed the “even Ludo” without too much difficulty. I had good reason to feel satisfied: Hans was silent. He had turned his head away, and I couldn’t see his face, but secretly, I rejoiced. I had trouble seeing how he could explain to Lila that he, too, had a brilliant future ahead of him, that he was entering a German military academy, because he was in love with a Polish girl. In that regard, I felt I had my hands on something good and solid, as we say around here, and I was not about to let go of it. I even allowed myself the luxury of feeling a little bit of pity for my rival. Times were hard for Teutonic knights. Indeed, it was undeniable that pleasing a woman was becoming a taller and taller order: America had already been discovered, as had the sources of the Nile; Lindbergh had already crossed the Atlantic; Mallory had scaled Mount Everest.

  The five of us were still near to the naïvetés of childhood — which may be the most fertile portion life gives us, and then takes away.

  9

  The very next day, Stas Bronicki came to see my uncle. He arrived with due pomp; such a man would not have had the vulgarity to change into ordinary clothes to visit ordinary people. The blue Packard gleamed; Mr. Jones, the chauffeur, lifted his cap as he opened the door with a solemnity that was as much an announcement of the servant’s importance as the master’s; and the Polish Imperial Guardsman of finance, as he was known in the Paris stock exchange, appeared in all his sartorial splendor: a rosewood-colored suit, a necktie in the colors of the best London club, butter-yellow gloves, a cane, a carnation at his buttonhole, and, as always, the slightly anxious expression of a man whose martingales have been treacherously foiled on the trading floor, the baccarat table, and the roulette wheel.

  We had just tucked into a snack, and our visitor, having glanced with great interest at the fat sausage, the peasant loaf, and the butter slab, was invited to join us, which he did immediately, wielding the big kitchen knife with panache and coughing only a little as he drained a few glasses of our rough pujol. Then he made my uncle an unexpected proposal. I was — he affirmed, in a Polish accent whose singing vowels and slightly abrupt consonants recalled Lila’s voice to me — I was, he repeated, a prodigy of mathematics and memory; my future merited great care. He proposed to be the one to guide my steps, and to initiate me little by little into the secrets of the stock market, for it would have been criminal to neglect my capabilities and even to see them waste away for lack of a proper nurturing environment. And since my young age prevented me from sitting for entrance exams for the Ministry of Finance, not to mention striking out on my own in a field where mathematical genius must be accompanied by a maturity of mind and certain kinds of indispensable knowled
ge, he proposed that in the meantime I stick with him each summer, as his personal secretary.

  “My dear sir, you must understand that your nephew and I possess complementary gifts, as it were. I am highly versed in the science of predicting stock market fluctuations, and Ludovic is capable of instantly translating my predictions and theories into the language of numbers. I have specialized offices in Warsaw, Paris, and London, but we summer here, and I cannot spend the entire day tied to the telephone. Yesterday your nephew demonstrated a speed in calculation and a memory that could gain me precious time in a world where time is money, as the expression so rightly goes. If you agree to it, my chauffeur will come to fetch him every morning and will bring him home at the end of the day. He shall be paid a monthly salary of one hundred francs, a portion of which he can place in the promising investment opportunities I shall indicate to him.”

  I was so overcome at the idea of spending my days close to Lila that I was tempted to see this proposition as influenced by Albatross the kite, who had flown off into the heavens the day before and perhaps had intervened up there on my behalf. As for my uncle, he lit his pipe and observed the Polish gentleman with a meditative eye. Finally, he pushed the sausage and the bottle toward him; Stas Bronicki helped himself, and this time, without any thought for elegance, he bit straight into it. Then, his mouth full, he exhaled a big garlicky breath and cried out to us from deep in his soul.

  “You probably find me excessively preoccupied with money — in your own way your passion is for winged and elevated things, so it probably seems a bit too down-to-earth for you. But, Monsieur Fleury, please know that truly, my battle is for honor. My ancestors conquered every enemy who ever tried to bring us to heel — money is the latest invader, the natural enemy of nobility, and I intend to vanquish it in its own territory. Do not think that I seek to defend the privileges of the past — I am sufficiently democratic to allow myself to be dispossessed in this respect with pleasure, but not by money. And …” He stopped there and, raising his eyebrows very high in a look of surprise, suddenly stared fixedly straight ahead of him. We were at that time in the last days of the Popular Front. My uncle, although he had no affiliations, as he put it, had nevertheless been sufficiently inspired by this historic moment to put together a Léon Blum out of paper, string, and cardboard, with a stunt tail. In the sky, the prime minister looked very fine, with his black hat and eloquently raised arms, but at the moment, he was, with little concern for chronology, hanging his head from a beam beside a kite that depicted the poet Musset holding a lyre.

  “What’s that there?” Stas Bronicki asked, putting down the sausage.

  “That’s my historical series,” Ambrose Fleury replied.

  “It looks like Léon Blum.”

  “I stay informed, that’s all,” explained my uncle.

  Bronicki gestured vaguely with his hand and turned away. “Anyway. Enough of that. As I was saying, your nephew’s talents could be extremely useful to me — no machine is capable of such rapid calculations. High finance is like fencing: speed is everything. You have to stay ahead of everyone else.”

  He glanced worriedly at Léon Blum again, pulled out his pocket square, and mopped his brow. In the periwinkle blue of his eyes he had the desperate gleam of some knight setting off on a quest for the Holy Grail, whom circumstances had obliged to pawn his horse, armor, and lance.

  It took me quite some time to discover that Bronicki’s financial genius was actually real. In fact, he had been among the first to perfect what is a now widely used financial technique, one that ensured that the banks were unstinting in their support of him: he was so deeply in their debt that their shareholders could not afford to corner him into bankruptcy.

  My uncle reacted cautiously. With the total absence of irony that he showed in his most ironic moments, he informed my future mentor that my path in life was, so to speak, already laid out for me, and that it did not soar to any great heights: “A nice little job as a postal worker, with pension guaranteed. That’s what I have in mind for him.”

  “But good God! Monsieur Fleury, your nephew is a genius of memory!” Stas Bronicki thundered, pounding his fist on the table. “And your only ambition for him is a job as a lowly clerk?”

  “Sir,” my uncle retorted. “Given the times that are ahead of us, lowly clerks may well have the very best position of all. They’ll be able to say, ‘At least I didn’t do anything!’”

  Nevertheless, it was agreed that during the summer months, I would make myself available to the Bronickis as a “mathematical clerk.” Whereupon my uncle and Mr. Jones each took the count, under the influence of the sausage — discretion prevents any mention herein of the two bottles of wine — by an elbow and helped him to the car. As he got in behind the wheel, the impassive Mr. Jones, who until that moment I had taken to be the embodiment of the very British virtues of phlegm and discretion, turned to my guardian, and, in a French strongly accented by English but which suggested incontestably that he had spent time in pursuits very different from those of a gentleman chauffeur, declared, “Poor bugger. Never saw such a patsy. Made to be stiffed.” Whereupon, having pulled on his gloves, he regained his imperturbable air and started up the Packard, leaving us dazzled by this sudden revelation of his linguistic abilities.

  “Well, well,” said my uncle. “Now you’re on your way. You’ve got yourself a powerful mentor, there. I’ll just ask one thing of you.” He looked at me gravely, and knowing him as I did, I began to laugh before he finished: “Just don’t ever lend him any money.”

  10

  Over the next three years, from 1935 to 1938, my life knew just two seasons: summer, which began in June when the Bronickis arrived from Poland, and winter, which came with their departure at the end of August, and lasted until their return. The interminable months I spent without seeing Lila were entirely devoted to memory, and I think that those absences rendered me eternally incapable of forgetting. She did not write often, but her letters to me were long and resembled the pages of a personal journal; Tad, when I heard from him, informed me that his sister was continuing to “dream of herself — right now she’s thinking of going to care for lepers.” Certainly, there were words of tenderness and even love in her letters, but they struck me as strangely impersonal; their effect seemed purely literary — so much so that I was not too surprised when, in one of her letters, Lila told me that she had been sending me passages from a much vaster work she was writing. Nevertheless, when the Bronickis returned to Normandy, she would run to me with open arms, covering me with kisses, laughing and sometimes even crying a little — these few instants were enough to make me feel that life kept all its promises and that doubt was not permissible. As for my functions as the “secretary calculator” — as I had been nicknamed by Podlowski, my employer’s factotum, a glabrous individual always ready to bow and scrape, all chin and jaw, with a part down the middle of his hair, and clammy hands — the work demanded of me was hardly gripping. When Bronicki received some banker, stockbroker, or fellow speculator, and together they plunged into complicated estimates of interest rates, increases, and profit margins, I would sit in on the meeting, juggling with millions and millions, making vast fortunes, deducting bank charges and loans, and then multiplying the prices of the shares to be bought that day by the morning’s projected profits, indicating that so many tons of sugar or coffee — presuming growth continued according to the intuitions of the great Imperial Guardsman of finance — multiplied by the day’s stock prices, in pounds sterling, francs, or dollars, would give this or that amount. I fell into the habit of millions so quickly that I have never again felt poor. As I engaged in these high-flying acrobatics, I would watch through the slightly open door for Lila to appear. She never failed to materialize, which would lead me to lose my head and commit some glaring error: ruining her father in the blink of an eye, causing cotton prices to plummet, dividing instead of multiplying, provoking flat panic in the Imperial Gua
rdsman and peals of laughter in his daughter. When, having slowly habituated myself to the maneuvers she deployed to measure — oh, how needlessly! — the force of her hold on me, I did manage to keep my head and avoid mistakes, her mouth would pucker into a moue of resentment and she would depart, more than a bit piqued. And then I’d feel as though I’d sustained an enormous loss, far graver than any stock-market crash.

  Every day at around five we would find each other at the far end of the gardens, in the shed behind the pond where the gardener disposed of the flowers that had “hit the age limit,” as Lila put it; they had lost their shine and freshness and had come there to breathe out the last of their perfume. We waded in petals, in red, blue, yellow, green, and violet, and in the plants we call weeds when they’re alive because they obey only themselves. It was here in these moments that Lila, who had learned to play the guitar, would “dream of herself” with a song on her lips. Seated among the plants, her skirt hitched up over her knees, she would tell me of her triumphant future: the American tours, the adoring crowds. So convincing was she in her fantasies, or rather, I adored her so much, that all those flowers at her feet already seemed to have been thrown there by her fervent admirers. I could see the tops of her thighs; I was dying of desire, dared nothing, didn’t move, wasted slowly away, that was all. In an uncertain voice she would launch into some song whose lyrics she had written herself and whose music had been composed by Bruno, and then, horrified by her old enemy — reality — which refused to bestow upon her vocal cords the divine accents she demanded of them, would throw down the guitar and weep.