The Kites Page 9

  “President Lebrun made an amusing gesture that’s apparently sent Hitler into a mad rage. He visited the rose garden our soldiers have planted along the Maginot Line.”

  Lila was sitting by my side, and her profile, so pure against the background of her pale hair, her gaze like the end of every question and all doubt, awoke within me a certainty of victory that was no illusion, for it could not and would not ever know defeat. So that makes one thing I have never been wrong about in my life, at least up until now.

  “Hans tells me that the top brass in the German army are just waiting for the right moment to oust Hitler,” she said.

  So that was how I learned Hans was at the château. Goddammit, I thought suddenly, and wasn’t even ashamed of this steep drop in my elevated thoughts — or rather of this irrepressible outbreak of popular indignation. “I don’t know if the German army will oust Hitler, but I do know who will oust the German army,” I declared. I really think I believed that the answer was: it’s me. I’m not sure which of these had gone to my head: the euphoria of the patriotic welcome I had just received, or Lila’s hand in mine. “We’re prepared,” I added, taking refuge in the plural, for modesty’s sake.

  Tad kept silent, with one of those thin smiles of his that further accentuated his eaglet profile. His sarcastic expression was difficult for me to stomach. Bruno attempted to set things a bit at ease. “And how are Ambrose Fleury and his kites?” he asked. “I think of him so often. He truly is a man of peace.”

  “My uncle never got over the Great War,” I explained. “He’s of another generation — they witnessed too many horrors. He mistrusts anything that gets people carried away; he thinks men should keep even their noblest ideas firmly tied to a solid line and hold on tight to the other end. Without that, he’s convinced that millions of lives will be lost ‘in pursuit of the blue yonder,’ as he calls it. He’s only happy when he’s with his kites. But we, the youth of France, we cannot be satisfied with paper dreams — with any dreaming at all, for that matter. We’re armed and ready to stand and defend, but not our dreams — our realities. The names of those realities are freedom, dignity, and human rights …”

  Gently, Lila withdrew her hand from mine. I don’t know if she felt uncomfortable with my patriotic fervor and my prolonged verbiage, or whether she was a bit vexed because I seemed to have forgotten her. But I hadn’t forgotten her at all: it was Lila I was talking about.

  15

  The Bronicki château resembled a fortress, which indeed was what it had once been. It was a few hundred yards from the Baltic Sea, and half a dozen miles from the German border, surrounded by gardens, a forest of pine trees, and sand; there was still a moat, but a wide staircase and a vast terrace had been built where the drawbridge once stood. History and salt air had eaten away at the walls and the old towers; the entry hall bristled with so many suits of armor, banners, shields, arquebuses, halberds, and heraldic devices that arriving there made me feel naked as a jaybird.

  I had walked only a few steps through this auction house atmosphere when I noticed Hans sitting in a tapestried armchair beside a marble table. He wore a pullover, riding breeches, and boots, and was reading an English magazine. We waved to each other from afar. I didn’t understand his presence there, knowing as I did that he was studying at a military academy in Preuchen, and that the tension between Poland and Germany grew from one week to the next. Lila explained to me that the “poor darling” was convalescing from pneumonia at the estate of his uncle, Georg von Tiele, across the border, which he traversed on horseback from time to time to visit his Polish cousins, over paths he had known since childhood — which to me simply meant that he was as in love with his cousin as ever.

  I found Lila changed. She had just turned twenty, but, as Tad had confided in me, she was still dreaming of herself.

  “I want to do something with my life,” she kept repeating to me.

  Once, I couldn’t resist snapping back at her, “Well, at least wait till I’ve gone home!”

  I really don’t know where I had come up with the idea that love could constitute the whole of life’s work and meaning. Probably I had inherited this total lack of ambition from my uncle. Perhaps, too, I had loved too early, too young, with all my being, and there was no room left over in me for anything else. Of course I had moments of lucidity, when meager reality and the banality of my actual self seemed infinitely distant from the expectations of the blonde, dreamy head resting on my chest, her eyes closed, a smile on her lips as she wandered off down some glorious future path. I had a premonitory sense that she actually found a kind of comforting strength in my simplicity, but it’s not easy to come to terms with the idea that a woman is attached to you because you help keep her feet on the ground, so as not to fly too far off. At the end of whole days spent “looking for herself in the forest,” as she’d say to me, she would come find me in my room and snuggle against me sadly, as if I were her resigned answer to all that she asked herself.

  “Love me, Ludo. That’s all I deserve. I’ll probably end up being one of those women who’s only good at being loved. Whenever I hear a man’s voice behind me murmuring, ‘She’s so pretty!’ I feel like they’re saying that my entire life could be contained in a mirror. And since I have no talent for anything —” she touched the tip of my nose, “— except you … I’ll never be a Marie Curie. I’m going to apply to medical school this year. With a little luck I might eventually heal someone.”

  I gleaned just one thing from her sadness: I was not enough. Seated beneath the tall pines at the edge of the Baltic, Lila would dream of herself with a stalk of grass between her teeth, and it seemed that the stalk of grass was me, and that I would be tossed to the wind at any moment. She became upset when I murmured to her, “You are my whole life,” and I didn’t know if it was the banality of the expression that made her indignant or the puny size of the unit of measurement.

  “Come on, Ludo. Other men have loved before you.”

  “I know, I’ve had precursors.”

  Today, I believe she harbored a bewildered desire that she was incapable of articulating: not to be reduced to her femininity alone. How, at my age, knowing so little of the world in which I lived, could I understand that the word “femininity” could be a prison for women?

  Tad said to me, “My sister is politically illiterate, but she dreams of herself like the revolutionary she hasn’t figured out that she is.”

  In mid-July, the police came and placed Tad under arrest, taking him to Warsaw and interrogating him for several days. He was suspected of having written “subversive” articles in one of the banned journals then circulating in Poland. He was released with apologies by orders from above: whether or not he was guilty, it was unthinkable that the historic house of Bronicki could be mixed up in such an affair.

  Rumors of war clamored louder every day, like the continuous pealing of thunder on the horizon; I walked through the streets of Gródek and strangers would come up and shake my hand when they saw on my jacket lapel the little tricolor insignia from which I had removed, thread by thread, the words “Clos Joli.” But no one in Poland believed that after barely twenty years, Germany would rush into a new defeat. Only Tad was convinced that a global conflagration was imminent and I sensed that he was torn between his horror of war and his hope that a new world would be born from the ruins of the old one; I was embarrassed when he, too, though well aware of my naïveté and my ignorance, asked anxiously: “Do you really think the French army is as strong as they say it is here?” Immediately, with a smile, he caught himself. “You have no idea, obviously. No one knows. That’s what history calls ‘unforeseen circumstances.’”

  When the sun agreed to it, we would steal off to a secluded spot on the Baltic shore, from which nothing seemed further than the end of this world, although it was just a few weeks away. And yet, I sensed a nervousness, even a terror in my companion, which I would ask vainly for her to expl
ain to me; she would shake her head and press herself to me, her eyes widened, her chest heaving. “I’m frightened, Ludo. I’m frightened.”

  “Of what?” And then I’d add, as was the right and proper thing to do, “I’m here.”

  Every great sensibility is a bit clairvoyant and once Lila murmured to me, with strange calm, “The earth will shake.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “The earth will shake, Ludo. I’m sure of it.”

  “There’s never been an earthquake in this region. That’s a scientific fact.”

  Nothing gave me more tranquil strength and self-assurance than those moments, when Lila lifted her almost imploring gaze to me. “I don’t know what’s gotten into me.” She touched her hand to her chest. “I feel like I don’t have a heart anymore. It’s become a frightened little rabbit.”

  I blamed the Baltic, the frigid waters, the sea mist. And for goodness’ sake, I was there, wasn’t I?

  Everything seemed so calm. The old Norse pines joined hands above our heads. The cawing of the crows announced nothing more than nightfall, and a nearby nest. Before my eyes, Lila’s profile against its backdrop of blondeness traced out the horizon of our destiny with more sureness than any cry of hatred or threat of war. She lifted grave eyes to mine. “I think I’m finally going to tell you, Ludo.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I love you.”

  It took me some time to regain my composure.

  “What is it?”

  “Nothing. But you were right. The earth just shook.”

  Tad, who now almost never left his wireless, observed us sadly. “Hurry up. You may be having the world’s last love affair.”

  But our youth rapidly reasserted itself. The castle possessed a veritable museum of historical costumes, occupying three rooms of the so-called memorial wing; its wardrobes and glass cases were filled with castoffs from the venerable past; I slipped on a uniform from the Imperial Guard, Tad allowed us to talk him into trying on the garb of the kosynierzy, those peasants armed with nothing but their scythes who had marched with Kościuszko against the Czar’s army; Lila appeared in a gown sparkling with gilded embroidery, which had belonged to some royal great-grandmother; Bruno, dressed as Chopin, took his seat at the piano. Lila, laughing helplessly at our masquerade, danced the polonaise with each of us in turn, while the mirrors, although they had been party to those bygone eras, observed benevolently. Nothing seemed surer to us than world peace when it became the countenance of my companion; as I bounded heavily across the parquet, Lila in my arms, everything was there, present and future; so it came to pass that a bold Norman Imperial Guardsman floated high above the earth after a queen whose name the history of Poland did not yet know — in those last days of July 1939, Polish history had little time for matters of the heart.

  Then we would exit the “memory wing” to skip off through the pathways of the estate; discreetly, Tad and Bruno would slip away and leave us to ourselves; the forest began at the end of the path and alternated in its murmurs between the voices of its pines and the voice of the Baltic; among the tall heather there were patches of earth and rock where time seemed never to have set foot. I loved these lost places, suspended in the secret reveries of the geological eras that held them captive. The marks of our bodies in the sand still remained from the preceding days. Lila caught her breath; I shut my eyes on her shoulder. But soon the red and white Imperial Guardsman’s uniform would join the royal robe in the heather, and then sea, sky, and earth were no longer; each embrace rescued life from all peril and error, and each made me feel as if I had known only spurious imitations until then. When consciousness returned, I felt my heart arriving slowly at its anchorage with all the peace of great sailing ships after years of absence. At the end of each caress, to take my hand from Lila’s breast and touch a rock or a tree was enough to banish all harshness there. Sometimes I tried to love with my eyes open, but closed them always, for seeing took up too much space and cluttered my senses. Lila pulled away from me a little and examined my face with a trace of disapproval in her gaze.

  “Hans is handsomer than you and Bruno has much more talent. I wonder why I prefer you to everyone else.”

  “Me, too,” I said.

  She laughed. “I certainly never will understand anything about women,” she replied.

  16

  It seemed to me that Bruno was avoiding me. The pain I saw in his face was haunting. Normally, he would spend five or six hours a day at the piano, and I’d sometimes linger below his window, listening to him. But for some time, everything had been silent. I went up to the music room: the piano had disappeared. What occurred to me then seemed mad, but was in fact how I thought of heartbreak: Bruno had thrown his piano into the sea.

  That very afternoon, having followed a footpath in search of Lila, I heard notes of Chopin mixed in with the murmuring of the waves. I took a few steps down a sandy walkway covered in green fir needles and arrived at the beach. To my left, I caught a glimpse of the piano, beneath a great pine, which was leaned in the way very old trees do, whose tops seem to dream of the past. Bruno was seated at the piano about twenty paces away from me; I saw him in profile, and in the sea air his face seemed to have an almost ghostly paleness, for it was that end-of-day light, which dims more than it illuminates and which gulls’ cries rip through suddenly, like foghorns.

  I stopped behind a tree, not to hide, but because everything was so very perfect in this northern symphony of paleness and sea that I feared I would interrupt one of those moments that could last a lifetime, if there were memory enough for it. A seagull escaped from the fog, traced its brief signal above the water, and flew off like a note. The swishing of the surf, although it was only that, the Baltic, nothing more than a stretch of sea, a plain mixture of water and salt, ended in the sand before the piano like a dog lying down at its master’s feet.

  Then Bruno’s hands went silent. I waited a little longer and approached him. Beneath his thick and tangled hair, his face still had the look of a bird just fallen from the nest. I searched for something to say, since you always have to fall back on words to prevent silence from speaking too loudly, then I sensed a presence behind me. Lila was there, barefoot in the sand, wearing a dress she must have borrowed from her mother, a striking ripple of sheerness and lace. She was weeping.

  “Bruno, my little Bruno, I love you too. As for Ludo, it could be over tomorrow or it could last a lifetime — it’s not my decision — it’s life!”

  She went over to Bruno and gave him a kiss on the lips. I was not jealous. It wasn’t that kind of kiss.

  I dreaded another rival altogether: I would see him on the paths, beneath the pines, holding two horses by their bridles — Hans, who had once again managed to cross the border to be with Lila. Despite her explanations that it was an accident of centuries and family trees that the Bronickis had grown a branch all the way into Prussia, the presence of this “cousin,” a cadet in a Wehrmacht military academy, was intolerable in my eyes. I could see it in the very way he stood there, indifferently, in the outfit of a English gentleman rider, an intrusion and an arrogance that left me beside myself. I clenched my fists and Lila looked worried.

  “What’s gotten into you? Why are you making that face?”

  I left them and ran off into the forest. Yet again, I could not understand, whatever their family ties, how the Bronickis could tolerate the presence of someone who might very well, from his position in the ranks of the German army, be preparing to invade the sacred “Corridor.” I had only once heard Hans himself begin to discuss the subject, after a particularly virulent speech by Hitler. We had all come together in the sitting room, gathering around the fireplace, in which the fire leapt and roared with the voice of an old lion dreaming of its tamer’s death. Tad had just shut off the wireless; Hans contemplated us.

  “I know what you’re thinking but you’re wrong. Hitler isn’t our m
aster; he’s our servant. The army will have no trouble getting rid of him, once he’s outlasted his usefulness. We’ll put an end to all this ignominiousness. Germany will be back in the hands of those who have always tended to its honor.”

  Tad was sitting in an armchair that had been worn threadbare by many historical Bronicki bottoms.

  “My dear Hans, the elite has taken its shit. Time to get off the pot. It’s over. The only thing left for them to bring into this world now is their own end.”

  Lila was half-reclined on one of those high-backed quadrupeds, stiff and monastic, which must have been the local equivalent of Louis XI style.

  “Our Father who art in heaven,” she murmured.

  We looked at her in surprise. Her attitude toward churches, religion, and priests was very Christian in its pity; as she said, “they must be forgiven, for they know not what they do.”

  “Our Father who art in heaven, make the world feminine! Make ideas feminine, make countries feminine, make heads of state feminine! Do you know, children, who the first man to speak in a feminine voice was?”

  Tad shrugged. “The idea that Jesus was a homosexual is just another Nazi rant — it has no grounding in historical fact.”

  “There’s a masculine thought for you, my little Tad! I’m not stupid enough to claim anything like that. I’m simply saying that the first man in the history of civilization to have spoken in a feminine voice was Jesus. I say it and I can prove it. After all, who was the first man to preach pity, love, tenderness, gentleness, forgiveness, and respect for weakness? Who was the first man to have said that strength, hardness, cruelty, fisticuffs, and bloodshed could all go to hell? Well, so to speak. Jesus was the first man to demand that the world be made feminine, and I demand it, too. I’m the second person after Christ to insist upon it, there you go!”