The Kites

  “He was posted in France. As soon as he heard we were in Paris, he took care of everything. He moved my parents into an apartment near the Parc Monceau. And then Hans came back from the Eastern Front …” She perked up.

  “You know, I even got to go back to my studies. I got my baccalauréat from the French Lycée in Warsaw. I’m going to apply to the Sorbonne and maybe the École du Louvre, as well. I’m fascinated by art history.”

  “By … art history?”

  I was having trouble swallowing.

  “Yes. I think I’ve found my calling. Do you remember how I was looking for myself? I think I’ve found myself now.”

  “At just the right time.”

  “Obviously, it’ll take a lot of courage and perseverance, but I think I can do it. I would have liked to go Italy, to Florence more than anything, to see the museums … The Renaissance, you know. But it’ll have to wait.”

  “The Renaissance can wait, it’s true.”

  She rose.

  “Shall I see you out?”

  “No, thank you. Hans is outside, in the car.” She stopped at the door.

  “Don’t forget me, Ludo.”

  “I don’t have much of a gift for forgetting.”

  I followed her down the stairs.

  “Bruno’s in England. He’s a fighter pilot over there.”

  Her face lit up.

  “Bruno? But he was so clumsy!”

  “Not in the sky, apparently.”

  I didn’t tell her about the fingers.

  “I owe you everything,” she said.

  “I really don’t know why.”

  “You kept me whole. I thought I had lost myself, and now I feel like that’s not true and that I was here all along — three and a half years! — here, with you, safe and sound. Whole. Keep me like that, Ludo. I need it. Give me a little more time. I need to put myself together again.”

  “Art history can really help you with that. Especially the Renaissance.”

  “Don’t tease me.”

  She lingered a moment more, then left me, and there was only one shadow left on the wall.

  I was calm. I was, with millions of other men, crossing over on a path along which each of us would gather up his own supply of sorrow.

  I went to join my uncle in the kitchen. He poured me a glass, observing me discreetly.

  “It sure will be funny,” he said.

  “What will?”

  “When France returns. I hope we’ll recognize her.”

  I clenched my fists.

  “Yeah, well, I couldn’t care less what she looks like or what she did while she was away. Just so long as she comes back, that’s all.”

  My uncle sighed.

  “No talking to this one anymore,” he grumbled.

  I was not spared the rumor that Lila had become von Tiele’s mistress. I remained as indifferent to this idle gossip as I was to the other voices whining about how “France was done for,” that it “would never be the same,” that it had “lost its soul,” and that the Resistance fighters were “dying for nothing.” I felt too deeply certain of the need to trot it out for a breather, as we say around here about the kind of people who need to give everything an airing.

  37

  I no longer hated the Germans. Four years after the defeat, it was difficult for me to engage in the routine of reducing Germany to its crimes and France to its heroes, given all the things I’d seen happen around me. I’d learned a fraternity very different from those glossy platitudes: it seemed to me that we were indissolubly linked by what made us different from one another, which could be upturned at any moment to make us cruelly similar. Sometimes I even believed that in the struggle I’d signed up for, I was helping our enemies, as well. There are consequences to being raised by a man who spent his life looking heavenward.

  I saw a German killed for the first time in the fields beyond La Gragne, where we had cleared out a landing strip. There were three of us that night, awaiting the arrival of a Lysander, which was supposed to escort an unnamed politician to England. The surroundings had been carefully inspected several times since sunset; our orders were to proceed with the utmost caution; just two weeks prior, a team in Haute-Seine had been taken unawares while receiving an airdrop, and we’d had to add five more names to our list of firing-squad victims.

  The beacons were lit at one in the morning, and precisely twenty minutes later the Lysander made its approach. We helped the passenger board the plane; the Lysander lifted off; and we set out to collect the lamps. We were on the way back, three hundred yards from the strip, when Janin grabbed my arm; I saw a metallic flash in the grass to our right and heard a furtive movement; the metal gleam moved and disappeared.

  There was a bicycle, a girl, and a German soldier. I recognized the girl: she worked at Monsieur Boyer’s bakery, in Cléry. The soldier was lying flat on his stomach beside her; he stared up at us with no expression in his face.

  I don’t know whether it was Janin or Rollin who pulled the trigger. The soldier simply lowered his head and remained that way, his face to the ground.

  The girl pulled away abruptly, as if he had become disgusting.

  “Get up.”

  She rose quickly, arranging her skirt.

  “Please don’t say anything,” she murmured.

  Janin looked surprised. He was from Paris and didn’t know village life. And then he got it, smiled, and lowered his gun.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Mariette.”

  “Mariette what?”

  “Mariette Fontet. Monsieur Ludovic knows me. Please don’t say anything to my parents.”

  “Okay. We won’t say anything, take it easy. You can go home.”

  He glanced at the body.

  “Hope he didn’t have time,” he said.

  Mariette broke down and sobbed.

  It was a bad night for me. I felt as if I’d gone over to the other side. I tried to think of all our men who’d been killed, but this only made it one more.

  A few days later, I walked into the bakery and stood there, as if I had something to apologize for. Mariette blushed and hesitated. Then she came up to me and murmured anxiously, “They won’t go telling my parents, at least?”

  It wasn’t proper for a girl to lay in the hay with some man. I think that was the only thing that bothered her. We had nothing to fear.

  Several times, I saw Lila come through Cléry in von Tiele’s Mercedes; once in the company of the general himself. One morning, as I was bicycling home from a drill at the Grollet’s farm, where we were learning how to handle some new explosives from a comrade who had trained in England, the Mercedes passed and then stopped. I stopped, too. Lila was alone in the car, with the driver. She had dark circles under her eyes; her eyelids were puffy. It was seven in the morning; I knew there had been a party the night before at Lady Esterhazy’s, whose order from the Clos Joli included champagne and Norwegian salmon, and that Duprat himself had been at the house to oversee his sauté d’agneau de lait and his coq au vin, which “the tiniest bit of garlic — too much or too little — could kill.” The utmost care was to be taken; all the German top brass would be there. “In this line of work,” he’d growled, “your reputation goes back on the line every goddamn time.”

  Lila needed my help getting out of the car: she had some drink in her. Beneath her white trench coat she wore a very chic red dress and red shoes with high heels. There was a thick red-and-white woolen shawl around her neck and shoulders. The colors of Poland, I thought. She was excessively made up, as if she’d wanted to hide her face. Perched on her hair, as if forgotten there by another life, was her beret. Only her gaze, in its blue distress, was locally grown. She held a book in her hand: Apollinaire. We had all of Hugo at La Motte, but not a single Apollinaire. One always forgets things.

  “He
llo, my Ludo.”

  I kissed her. The military driver had his back to us.

  “There’s a lot of talk about me around here, isn’t there?”

  “I’m a little hard of hearing, you know.”

  “They say I’m von Tiele’s mistress.”

  “They do say.”

  “It’s not true. Georg is a friend of my father’s. Our families have been joined since forever. You have to believe me, Ludo.”

  “I believe you, but I don’t give a damn.”

  She began speaking feverishly of her parents. They lacked nothing, thanks to Georg.

  “He’s an admirable man. He’s openly anti-Nazi. He’s even saved Jews.”

  “That’s normal. He has two hands.”

  “What does that mean? What are you talking about?”

  “It’s not me, it’s William Blake. There’s a Blake poem about that. One of his hands was covered in blood. The other carried the torch. Why don’t you come see me?”

  “I’ll come. I have to find myself again, you know. Do you think of me a little?”

  “Every so often I don’t think about you. I draw a blank — it can happen to anyone.”

  “I feel a little lost. I don’t even know where I am with my life. I drink too much. I’m trying to forget myself.”

  I took the book from her hands and leafed through it.

  “Apparently Frenchmen are reading more than ever before. You know Monsieur Jolliot, the bookseller …”

  “I know him very well,” she said, with unexpected vehemence. “He’s a friend. I go to his shop nearly every day.”

  “Well, he says that the French have taken to poetry with the courage that’s born of despair. How’s your father?”

  “He’s completely retreated from reality. A total atrophy of the senses. But there’s hope. Occasionally he shows signs of consciousness. Maybe he’ll come back to himself.”

  I couldn’t help feeling a certain admiration for Stas Bronicki. The way that aristocratic pimp had figured out how to shield himself from base circumstance was pretty breathtaking — protected from all contact with a repugnant historical era by his wife and his daughter. A real elitist.

  “Never saw such a clever old rogue,” I said.

  “Ludo! I forbid you to —”

  “Sorry. That’s my country ass talking. I must have some kind of hereditary grudge against nobs.”

  We walked a few steps, to get a little distance between ourselves and the driver.

  “You know, things are going to change soon, Ludo. The German generals don’t want a war on two fronts. And they can’t stand Hitler. One day —”

  “Yeah, I know that theory. I already heard it from Hans, right before the invasion of Poland.”

  “Just give it a little more time. Things aren’t going badly enough for the Germans yet …”

  “Well, no, they’re not.”

  “But I’ll pull it off.”

  “Pull what off?”

  She was silent, gazing directly in front of her.

  “I need more time,” she said again. “Of course, it’s very difficult, and sometimes I get shaky and lose my nerve … So I drink too much. I shouldn’t. But I’m sure, with a little luck …”

  “What? What, with a little luck?”

  Shivering, she pulled her Polish colors closer around her.

  “I always wanted to make something of my life. Something grand and … terribly important …”

  The dream was still crawling.

  “Yes,” I said. “You always did want to save the world.”

  She smiled, “No, that was Tad. But who knows …”

  I knew that slightly mysterious, impenetrable air so well, the one Tad used to call “her Garbo face.”

  “Maybe it’ll be me,” she said placidly.

  It was pitiful. She could barely keep herself upright; I had to help her back into the car. I arranged the blanket around her knees. She remained silent another moment, the little volume of Apollinaire in her hands, a smile on her lips, her gaze lost in the distance. And then suddenly she turned to me in a burst of warmth, with a voice so grave, almost solemn, that it took me by surprise.

  “Trust me, Ludo. You all have to trust me, just a little longer. I’ll pull it off. I’ll leave my mark on history. And I’ll make you proud.”

  I kissed her on her forehead.

  “There, there,” I told her. “Don’t be scared, now. They lived happily ever after and had lots of children.”

  I have no excuses. I paid absolutely no heed to the words of the woman everyone at the Clos Joli called “that poor little Polish girl, with her Germans.” Just as fantastical, just as wildly fanciful as she ever was. I stood by the side of the road with my bicycle, watching sadly as the Mercedes drove off. “I’ll leave my mark on history. And I’ll make you proud …” It was so terribly pathetic. It seemed to me that, in her free fall, Lila’s need to dream of herself was even greater than before, at Le Manoir des Jars, on the shores of the Baltic — fallen, crushed on the ground, the broken dream continued to feebly flutter its wings. I had not the slightest suspicion, no inkling, no trace of a premonition. Perhaps it was the years of struggle and their implacable demands — maybe with all that pressure to “live reasonably,” I was beginning to run short on folly. I had no idea that of all the far-flung kites, lost in search of the blue yonder, the Polish one would fly the highest — and come the closest to changing the course of the war.

  38

  I didn’t see Lila again for several months.

  The summer of 1942 was a turning point for the underground. In a single night, in the Fougerolles-du-Plessis region, “the devil passed six times,” according to the coded message: that meant six airdrops, mostly antitank mines, bazookas, and mortars. The supplies had to be hidden away within a few hours. In Sauvagne, my classmate André Fernin was arrested for possession of fifty incendiary devices; he barely had time to swallow his cyanide. Nowadays these stories are so well known they’ve been forgotten. They carried out search after search in our area, and didn’t spare La Motte — either someone denounced us, or maybe the Gestapo sensed a natural enemy in Ambrose Fleury. None of their searches produced anything — the Buis cache, for example, where Bruno had been hidden, functioned all the way to V-E day. In the workshop, Grüber had gotten his hands on our old Zola, forgotten in a corner, with the words J’accuse radiating in a halo around his head, but he hadn’t recognized the likeness, and merely asked, “Who’s he accusing, der Kerl?”

  “It’s the title of a very famous song from the turn of the century. The woman walks out with her lover, and the man accuses her of being unfaithful.”

  “He doesn’t look like a singer.”

  “All the same, he had a very good voice.”

  The Cléry police commissioner himself had issued a friendly warning to Ambrose Fleury, with a bit of a smile — it seemed comical to him, the idea that this gentle pacifist might be mixed up in some kind of subversive activity.

  “My good Ambrose, any minute now, they probably imagine you’ll be flying the Cross of Lorraine!”

  “You know me — that sort of thing …” my uncle observed.

  “I know, I know.”

  But dreamers have a kind of ill repute; there’s an everlasting and organic link between dreaming and rebellion. We were kept under surveillance, and for a while our weapons cache was unusable. It was located under the manure pit and beneath the outhouse, which we had been careful not to empty for some months.

  And yet it was during this particularly dangerous period for us that my uncle let himself go with a gesture of madness. News of the Vel’ d’Hiv roundup made it to Cléry toward the end of July 1942. We were at the Clos Joli that evening, meeting around an old bottle, as the master of the place frequently invited his friend Ambrose Fleury to do. Duprat, who had a way with words
, would on some of these occasions read us a poem he had written in alexandrines. But that evening, he seemed to be in a particularly dark mood.

  “Did you hear the news, Ambrose? About the Vel’ d’Hiv roundup?”

  “What roundup?”

  “They rounded up all the Jews and deported them to Germany.”

  My uncle was silent. In that moment, there were no more kites for him to hang on to. Duprat slammed his fist on the table.

  “The children, too,” he growled. “They handed over the children, too. We’ll never see them back alive.”

  Ambrose Fleury was holding a glass of wine. It was the only time in my life I saw his hand tremble.

  “Well, there you go. I’ll tell you what, Ambrose. It’s a real blow to the Clos Joli. You might ask what the one thing has to do with the other — but it has everything to do with it. Everything. Goddammit. For a man such as myself, working my way into an early grave to preserve a certain image of France, it’s impossible to accept such a thing. Can you imagine? Children. They’re sending children off to die. Do you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to close this place for a week. In protest. Obviously, I’ll open up again after that — nothing would please the Nazis more than to see me shut my doors for good. They’ve been trying to break me for a long time. All they want is for France to give up on itself. But my mind is made up. I’m closing down for eight days. They don’t go together, the Clos Joli and handing kids over to the Boche.”

  No one had ever yet heard Duprat utter the word “Boche.”

  My uncle set his glass down on the table and stood up. His face had gone gray and the number of his wrinkles appeared to have doubled. We rode our creaky bicycles through the night. The moon shone brightly. When we reached the house, he left me without a word and shut himself in his workshop. I couldn’t sleep. I suddenly understood how much we’d been using the Germans, and even the Nazis, for cover. For quite a while now, an idea had been working its way into my mind, one that I had a lot of trouble getting rid of afterward; maybe I never really managed to shake it off. The Nazis were human beings. And the thing that was human in them was their inhumanity.