“You’re too modest, Marcellin,” my uncle would tell him.
I was there for some episodes in the birth of “the legend,” when Duprat would grow angry and deny “all that bullshit.” At those times my uncle Ambrose would put his arm around Duprat’s shoulders and say gravely: “Come now, Marcellin. Come now. Some things are bigger than all of us. Show a little humility. The Clos Joli lived through some terrible times, and it needs to rebuild.”
Marcellin Duprat grumbled about it for a while, but in the end he let it be said.
36
On March 27, 1942, the weather was cold and gray. I had a transport to deliver in Verrières, six miles from Cléry: two new AMK II receivers, and a number of “curiosities,” including timed explosive devices in the shape of goat cheeses, and exploding cigarettes, all of it hidden in the wagon box between the boards and under the hay. I had picked the materials up at the Buis’ and Dr. Gardieu had lent me his cart; Clémentin the horse was walking along at a steady clip. Just for show, I had placed a few kites on the hay; Ambrose Fleury’s workshop still had a good reputation, and was even listed among the Youth Department’s “activities to encourage,” as the mayor of Cléry himself had let us know.
My route followed the road that ran along the grounds of Le Manoir des Jars; arriving before the gate, I noticed it had been left wide open. I had a rather strange proprietary feeling about the manor — or, more precisely, a feeling that I was the keeper of its memory. I accepted no intrusions, although I was aware there wasn’t much I could do about them. I stopped Clémentin, got down from the wagon, and made my way up the main driveway. There were about a hundred yards to cover. I was some twenty paces from the fountain when I noticed a man seated on the stone bench, to my right, beneath the bare chestnut trees. His head was lowered and his nose was hidden in the fur collar of his coat: he had a cane in his hand and was using it to trace signs in the dirt. It was Stas Bronicki. I felt no emotion; my heart did not skip a beat; I’d always known that life was not without meaning, and that it was doing its best, even if fell short from time to time. They had returned. I moved closer. Bronicki did not appear to see me. He was looking at his feet. He had traced out several numbers with the tip of his cane, and had pushed a dead chestnut over one of them.
Von Tiele’s Mercedes was parked in front of the ruined manor; brambles had grown up through the half-crumbled veranda and stairs; the roof and the attic had disappeared. The upper floors had gone up in flames; all that had remained intact, blackened by fire, was the lower portion of the façade around the entrance, its windows gaping with emptiness. The only rooms that had escaped the flames were those on the ground floor. The door had been ripped off its hinges by someone scavenging wood for the winter.
From inside the building, I heard Lila’s laughter.
I stood there motionless, my eyes raised. I saw first Hans, then General von Tiele emerge; another moment, and I saw Lila. I walked forward a step or two and she saw me. She didn’t seem surprised. I remained immobile. There was, in this apparition, something so simple and so natural that even today I can’t say whether this absence of reaction was the effect of a shock so great that it emptied me of all sensation. I lifted my cap, like a servant.
Lila was wearing a white, fur-lined jacket and a beret; she had several books under her arm. She descended the steps, walked over to me, and held out a gloved hand, smiling.
“Oh, hello Ludo. I’m happy to see you again. I was just thinking about coming to visit you. Are you well?”
I remained silent. This time, I began feeling a bewilderment rise within me that metamorphosed into fear and panic. “I’m fine. And you?”
“Oh, you know, what with all these horrors and everything that’s happening, I can say we’ve been lucky. Except for my father, who’s … Well, it’s medical, and they think it will get better. I’m sorry I haven’t been by La Motte yet, I promise I’ve been thinking about it.”
“Really.”
All of this was so polite, so well mannered, that it was starting to feel like a nightmare to me.
“I came here to see what remained,” she said. I think she was talking about the manor. “Almost everything burned, but I was able to salvage some books. You see: a Proust, a Mallarmé, a Valéry … There’s really not much left.”
“No,” I answered. And then murmured: “But it will come back.”
“I’m sorry? What do you mean?”
“It will come back.”
She laughed. “You haven’t changed, have you? Still a little strange.”
“I suffer from an excess of memory, as you know.”
This seemed to irk her, she appeared slightly flustered, but she pulled herself together and looked at me with kindness.
“I know. You mustn’t. Obviously, with all this … misfortune, the past is even happier, because it’s even further away.”
“Yes, that’s true. And … Tad?”
“He stayed in Poland. He didn’t want to leave. He’s in the Resistance.”
Von Tiele and Hans were just steps away and could hear us.
“I always knew Tad would do great things,” Lila said. “Actually, we all thought so. He’s one of the men who will take Poland’s destiny in hand one day … Well, whatever’s left of it.”
Von Tiele had turned discreetly away from us.
“Did you think of me a little, Ludo?”
“Yes.”
Her gaze disappeared somewhere among the treetops. “It was another world,” she said. “It seems centuries since then. Well, I won’t keep my friends waiting any longer. How is your uncle?”
“He keeps at it.”
“Still with his kites?”
“Always. But he’s not allowed to fly them very high anymore, now.”
“Give him my love. Well, see you soon, Ludo. I’ll be sure to drop by and visit. We have so much to catch up about. You weren’t drafted?”
“No. I was declared unfit. Apparently I’m a little crazy. Runs in the family.”
She brushed my arm with her fingertips and went to help her father into the car. She sat down between him and General von Tiele. Hans seated himself behind the wheel.
I heard crows laughing.
Lila waved at me. I waved back. The Mercedes disappeared down the drive.
I sat there for a long time, trying to locate myself again. The feeling of not being there anymore, not elsewhere, not anywhere, and then a slow wave of despair rose in me. I struggled. I didn’t want to cross over to the enemy. Despair is always a surrender.
Numb, incapable of movement, I stood upright on the gravel, my cap in my hand, and as the minutes ticked away, the feeling of unreality intensified before the ruins, in these ghostly grounds with their frost-whitened trees, where everything swam in immobility and lifelessness.
It wasn’t true. It wasn’t possible. My imagination had played this trick on me, it had tortured me as revenge for all I had demanded of it for so many years. Just another vision, another waking dream I had let myself enter too easily — and now it was having my head. This apparition couldn’t be Lila — so politely sophisticated, so indifferent, and so far removed from the woman who had lived with such intensity in my memory for nearly four years. That detached voice, her very politeness while conversing with me, the total absence of any trace of our past in the chilly blue of her gaze — no, none of that had actually happened, my malady had simply worsened with the weight of solitude; I had overnourished my “folly” and was now paying the price. A phantasm of horror, brought on by nervous exhaustion and passing discouragement.
In the end, I managed to wrench myself out of my collapse, and made for the gate.
I had walked a few steps when I noticed the bench where I had first thought I’d seen Stas Bronicki sitting a little while earlier, tracing imaginary roulette numbers into the dirt with the tip of his cane.
I ha
rdly dared lower my eyes to look, to be sure.
The numbers really were there, with a dead leaf bet on the number seven.
Barely conscious of what I was doing, I managed to drop my delivery off at Verrières, and made it home. My uncle was in the kitchen. He had a drink or two in him and was seated near the fire, stroking Grimaud the cat, who was asleep in his lap. I had trouble speaking.
“She hasn’t left me for a single instant since she’s been gone, and now that she’s back, she’s another …”
“Another lady, my man. You invented her too much. Four years of absence leaves way too much up to the imagination. The dream has landed, now; that always does some damage. Even ideas quit looking like themselves when they’re embodied. Wait till you see our faces when France returns! Everyone will be saying, ‘That’s not the real France, it’s different!’ The Germans have given us a lot of imagination. The reunion will be cruel once they’re gone. But something tells me you’ll get her back, your little lady. Love has genius, and it has the gift of taking everything you throw at it. As for you, you thought you were living off memory, but you were actually mostly living in your imagination.”
He laughed.
“And imagination, Ludo, is no way to treat a lady.”
At one o’clock in the morning, I was standing at my window, my face in flames, awaiting I don’t know what maternal caress from the night. I heard a car, a long silence, the steps creaking, the door open behind me. I turned around: my uncle stood there alone for an instant, lamp in hand, and then he disappeared and I saw Lila. She was sobbing, and the sounds of her weeping seemed to emerge from the night of some dark forest. A moan that seemed to ask to be forgiven for itself, because no one had the right to so much sorrow, to so much suffering. I rushed toward her, but she gestured me away.
“No, Ludo. Don’t touch me. Later, maybe, later. First you have to know … you have to understand …”
I took her hand. She sat down on the edge of the bed, wrapped in her fur jacket, her hands folded demurely in her lap. We were silent. Outside, we heard the creak of winter branches. In her eyes was an inquisitive expression, almost supplicating, and a hesitation, as if she still wasn’t sure she could trust me. I waited. I knew the cause of her hesitation. Most likely I was still the Ludo she had known, the little Norman country boy who had spent the three years of war near his uncle and his kites, and who couldn’t understand her. And in everything she would tell me that night, the words, “Do you understand, Ludo? Do you understand?” returned without cease, her tone anxious and almost desperate, as if she were certain that these admissions, these confessions, were beyond anything that I could conceive of or accept, let alone forgive.
She looked at me imploringly again, then began to speak; it felt to me that her need to talk was less about letting me know as it was about attempting to let herself forget.
I listened. I sat on the other end of the bed and listened. Trembling a little, but I had to face it somehow. She smoked cigarette after cigarette, me lighting them for her as she continued. The petrol lamp conjoined our two shadows on the wall.
On September 1, 1939, at 4:45 a.m., the German battleship Schleswig-Holstein, without a declaration of war, had opened fire on the Polish garrison that was located on the Gródek Peninsula. In the hours and days that followed, the rest of the dirty work had been finished off by the German air force.
“We were all caught in the bombing … Tad was able to join his combat group — you know, the one that was holding political meetings when you were staying with us …”
“I remember.”
“Bruno had left two weeks before that for England … We were able to take refuge on a farm … My father was in a state of shock, my mother was completely hysterical … Luckily, I met a German officer who was a gentleman …
“There are some.”
She glanced at me fearfully.
“First off I had to survive, save my family … Do you understand, Ludo? Do you understand?”
I understood.
“It lasted three months … then he was sent somewhere and …”
She trailed off. I didn’t ask her: And after that one, who? How many others? With the memory I had, I wasn’t about to start keeping those kinds of accounts. First off I had to survive, save my family …
“If Hans hadn’t found us — we were able to flee to Warsaw — I don’t know what would have become of us … He’d fought in the French campaign and had managed to have himself stationed in Poland, just so he could take care of us …”
“Of you.”
“He wanted to marry me, but the Nazis forbade marriage with Polish women …”
“And to think I might have killed him!” I exclaimed. “First I could have strangled him, when he jumped me at Vieille-Source when we were kids, and then in our duel at Gródek … There really is a God!”
I shouldn’t have put so much sarcasm in my voice. I was taking the easy way out.
She looked me over.
“You’ve changed, Ludo.”
“Forgive me, darling.”
“When Hitler attacked Russia, Hans followed General von Tiele to the Smolensk front … We managed to flee to Romania … At first, we had some jewelry left, but then …”
She had become the mistress of a Romanian diplomat, then of a doctor who had seen to her — an abortion that had almost cost her life …
“Do you understand, Ludo? Do you understand?”
I understood. You had to survive, to save your family. She had made “friends” in diplomatic circles. Her mother and father had wanted for nothing. All in all, she had made out all right in the survival game.
“In 1941, we were finally granted French visas, thanks to someone at the embassy who I … who I knew … But we didn’t have a single cent left, and …”
She trailed off.
I felt a tranquility grow and smile inside of me, as if I knew that, fundamentally, nothing could happen to us. I couldn’t really say what I mean by “fundamentally,” and since we never know how others love, I don’t want to seem like I’m boasting. Fluttering briefly across my mind appeared an image of our lovely kite Fourseas, sailing magnificent in the blue sky, and then vanishing, then turning up again, covered in scrapes and bumps, shattered and torn. Maybe the suffering had called out some ancient Christian fiber in me, but as I’ve said, I’d acquired an acute sense of insignificance. And besides that, to hell with that dear old saw, “to understand all is to forgive all,” which Monsieur Pinder long ago assigned to us as a composition topic in class. “To understand all is to forgive all” loiters in the dark corners where renunciation and resignation are found. Really, I didn’t show any “tolerance” with Lila. The line from tolerance to the intolerable is all too easy to trace, and we’re usually led there by the nose. I loved a woman with all her sorrows, that’s all.
Her eyes, when she lifted them to me, were intense.
“There were so many times I wanted to get in touch with you; I wanted to come here, but I felt so … I felt …”
“Like a tramp?”
She said nothing.
“Listen to me, Lila. In this time and place, being a tramp is no kind of sin. In any time and place, really. Where your ass has been is the least of our worries. Tramphood is pretty much sainthood, compared to all the rest.”
“You’ve changed so much, Ludo!”
“Maybe. The Germans helped me a lot. The inhumanity of it is what makes Nazism so horrible — that’s what people always say. Sure. But there’s no denying the obvious: part of being human is the inhumanity of it. As long as we refuse to admit that inhumanity is completely human, we’ll just be telling ourselves pious lies.”
Grimaud the cat made his entrance, tail up, rubbing himself against our legs, demanding to be petted.
“In Paris, those first six months, you can’t imagine … We didn’t know a s
oul anymore. I worked as a waitress in a brasserie, as a shopgirl at the Prisunic supermarket … My mother was suffering from terrible migraines …”
“Ah. Migraines. They can be awful.”
As for Lila’s father, he had, so to speak, lost his sight. A kind of mental blindness. He had closed his eyes on the world.
“My mother and I had to care for him like a child. He was a friend of Thomas Mann’s, of Stefan Zweig’s, a man for whom Europe was an incomparable light … And when that light went out and everything we believed in crumbled, he retreated from reality, so to speak … A complete atrophy of the senses.”
Well, shit, I thought. That’s very convenient.
“The doctors tried everything …”
I almost asked, “Even a kick in the ass?” but you had to respect that old aristocratic porcelain. I was sure that Bronicki had found the thing he needed to let him off-load all responsibility onto his wife and daughter. He could not, after all, allow himself to know what his daughter was doing to “survive, to save my family.” He was defending his honor, you might say.
“Then I was able to find work as a mannequin for Coco Chanel …”
“Coco who?”
“Chanel … You know, the famous clothing designer …”
“Oh right, of course … The Clos Joli!”
“Pardon?”
“No, nothing.”
“But I wasn’t making enough to take care of my parents and all that …”
A pause. Grimaud the cat moved back and forth between us, surprised at our indifference. The pause lasted, slipped inside me, invaded me entirely. I waited for the “Do you understand, Ludo? Do you understand?” But there was only the mute distress of that gaze, and I lowered my eyes.
“Georg saved us.”
“Georg?”
“Georg von Tiele. Hans’s uncle. Our estates bordered each other on the Baltic …”
“Yes, yes. Your estates. Of course.”