The Kites

by Romain Gary

  I took her arm and tried to reassure her, even as I felt the beginning of something on my lips that bore a marked resemblance to my uncle Ambrose’s ironic smile.

  “It may just be that you don’t love me,” I repeated to her. “Now obviously, that’s not what you’ve been expecting. But it will come. It might be Bruno. Or Hans, you’ll be seeing him again soon — they’re saying that the German army is all ready for business at the Polish border. Or maybe you’ll meet somebody else you truly love.”

  She shook her head, in tears.

  “But no, that’s exactly it, I love you, Ludo! I really love you. But this, this can’t be all there is to it — all there is to loving someone. Or maybe I’m just mediocre. I have a tiny heart, I’m superficial, incapable of depth, of grandeur, of intensity!”

  I remembered my uncle’s advice, and, once again taking a firm hold, so to speak, of the line of my beautiful kite to keep it from flying off and losing itself in all that Slavic torment, I pulled her to me; my lips pressed to hers, my last conscious thought being that if what Lila was giving me was not, as she had cried out to me, “true, great love,” well, then life was even more abounding in beauty, joy, and happiness than I had imagined, even as she departed for Paris that very evening — here, without premeditation but not without a smile, I have created a syntactic confusion between “she” and “life” — where her parents were waiting for her.

  Having been backed into a corner, the Radziwiłłs, Sapiehas, Potockis, and Zamoyskis had patriotically renounced their pursuit, so as not to tarnish one of Poland’s most illustrious names, at a moment when statesmen less committed to honor were abandoning themselves to shame and bowing at Munich before the Nazi rabble. I returned once more to Le Manoir des Jars; Tad and Bruno were overseeing the packing of the artworks and managing “details” such as the payment of the gardeners’ and servants’ salaries. This was causing some difficulties. The portrait of Colonel Count Jan Bronicki in Somosierra had already come down from the wall and was waiting to be crated and returned to its native soil. Podlowski wandered from room to room, choosing which of the interior furnishings were to be sold off to pay salaries and settle the bill at the Clos Joli, which Marcellin Duprat refused to forget. The Bronickis’ suppliers in Clos and Cléry were no more inclined to relent, and attempted to seize hold of anything that might serve as compensation. A few weeks later, Genitchka finally agreed to part with a diamond “souvenir,” and everything worked out. A significant proportion of the house’s contents, including the piano and the globe, were even left there in the hopes of a return. In the meantime, however, Bruno despaired at the thought that he might lose his Steinway. As for Tad, he was more preoccupied with current political events than such material concerns, and greeted me from where he was sitting, a stack of newspapers in his lap.

  “We probably won’t be back,” he told me, “but that’s nothing, because I’m pretty sure that pretty soon millions of men won’t be back anywhere.”

  “There won’t be a war,” I said firmly, as I was ready to sacrifice whatever it took to see Lila again. “I’ll come and visit you in Poland next summer.”

  “If there still is a Poland,” Tad answered. “Now that Hitler’s taken full measure of your cowardice, he’ll stop at nothing.”

  Bruno was packing his sheet music into a crate. “The piano is done for,” he said to me.

  “What egotism,” Tad grumbled. “That one, I tell you. The world can go to hell in a handbasket, the only thing he cares about is a little more music.”

  “France and England won’t allow it,” I said, and Tad must have been very right to speak of egotism because immediately and with utter clarity I realized that when I said “France and England won’t allow it,” what I meant was that my definitive separation from Lila wouldn’t be allowed.

  Disgusted, Tad tossed the stack of newspapers to the floor. He observed me with only marginally less displeasure. “Oh yes, ‘the most desperate songs are the most beautiful.’ And we could also add, ‘blessed are those who have died in a just war; blessed are the ripe sheaves and the wheat gathered in.’ Poetry will march hand in hand with music, and the irresistible force of culture will sweep Hitler away. It’s all over, kids.” He looked at me again and pursed his lips. “You’re welcome in Gródek next summer,” he added. “It’s possible that I’m wrong. Perhaps I underestimate the all-powerful force of love. Maybe there are gods I don’t know about who make sure that nothing prevents lovers from reuniting. Oh, goddammit all! Goddammit! How could you have capitulated like that?”

  I informed him that my uncle, the complete pacifist and conscientious objector that he was, had just stepped down from his post as honorary president of the Order of the Kites of France, because of Munich.

  “What’s surprising about that?” he snapped at me. “That’s exactly what you call a conscientious objector. But who knows, things might drag on like this for two or three more years. So, see you next year, Ludo.”

  “See you next year.”

  We hugged goodbye and they saw me out to the terrace. I see the two of them again now, waving at me. I was certain that Tad was wrong, and I felt a bit sorry for him. He passionately loved all of humanity, but really, he had nobody. He believed in misfortune because he was lonely. You need two to hope. All laws of large numbers begin with that certainty.

  13

  During the winter of 1938–1939 my memory asserted itself in a manner that justified the worst fears once expressed by Monsieur Herbier when he came to warn my uncle that “the boy seems entirely lacking in the ability to forget.” I don’t know if it actually was that way for all the Fleurys, as I had so often heard it said, because this time it had nothing to do with liberty, human rights, or France, which was still around and appeared not to demand any particular effort of memory. Lila now accompanied me everywhere. I had returned to my job as an accountant at the Clos Joli, and had begun working for other businesses in the area as well, in order to save up the money I needed for my trip to Poland; I kept up with the farm, but during that whole time Lila’s presence at my side took on such physical reality that my uncle, with or without irony, had begun setting a third place at the table for the one who was absent so presently. He consulted Dr. Gardieu, who diagnosed a state of obsession and recommended jogging and team sports. I was not surprised by the physician’s lack of understanding, but my guardian’s attitude pained me, although I understood his long-standing mistrust of any absolute loyalties, as they had already caused so much trouble in the family. We argued a few times. He claimed that the trip to Poland I was planning for that summer would be full of the worst kind of disappointment, and, what’s more, that the expression “first love” by definition signified something that was meant to end. Nevertheless, it seemed to me from time to time that my uncle’s gaze, when he looked at me, wasn’t lacking in pride.

  “Anyhow, if you don’t have enough money for the trip,” he ended up saying, “I’ll give you some. You’ll need to buy some clothes, because there’s no way you’re going to visit those people dressed like a hobo.”

  Over the winter, Lila wrote me a few letters; they became shorter and shorter until they were only postcards. That was normal, we would be reunited soon, and the very brevity of her words, “We’re all expecting you,” “I’m so happy to think you’ll finally see Poland,” “We’re thinking of you,” “June’s coming!” seemed to shorten the time, leapfrogging over the months and weeks. And then, in the time leading up to my departure, a long silence, as if to further abridge the last weeks of the wait.

  I took the train from Cléry on June 20. My uncle accompanied me to the station. He said just one thing to me, as we pedaled side by side on our bicycles: “It’ll be a change in landscape.”

  Landscape, lands — the earth was the farthest thing from my mind. The world was not invited on this trip. All I could think of was being whole again, of getting back my two missing arms. When the trai
n began moving and I leaned out the window, Ambrose Fleury called out to me, “I hope you won’t take too big a tumble. I hope I won’t have to pick you up all dented and banged up like our old Fourseas! You remember?”

  “You know I never remember anything!” I called back to him, and we left each other like that, in a burst of laughter.

  14

  Never before had I left my native Normandy. Of the world I knew only geography, and of history I knew only what I had learned in my textbooks, or from looking at my father and his brother Robert’s names on the Cléry war monument, or from listening to my guardian comment about one or the other of his kites. It did not occur to me to think of history in the present tense. Of politics and those who engaged in it I knew only the faces of Édouard Herriot, André Tardieu, Édouard Daladier, Pierre Laval, Pierre-Étienne Flandin, or Albert Sarraut, who I glimpsed from time to time as I left Marcellin Duprat’s little office in the Clos Joli. Of course I knew that Italy was fascist, but whenever I saw “A bas le fascisme!” written across a wall I wondered what the inscription was doing there, since we were in France. The Civil War in Spain, of which Tad had so often spoken, seemed to me a far-off affair of other people with other customs; after all, everyone knew — and said all the time — that the Spanish had blood in their blood, so to speak. I had been indignant over Munich, the year before, mostly because Hans was German, and it had seemed to me that I’d lost a point in our rivalry. The only thing I was sure of was that France would never let Poland down — or, to be more specific, Lila. Today, such ignorance and indifference in a young man of eighteen seems difficult to understand, but back then, France was still the land of grandeur, peaceful strength, prestige — a country so certain of its “spiritual mission” that nothing was more natural in my eyes than to let it take care of itself; this, it seemed to me, saved the French a lot of worry. I can’t even say I was one of the uneducated; quite the opposite, in fact: mandatory public education had simply taught me too well that liberty, dignity, and human rights were unassailable so long as our nation remained faithful to itself. And I had no doubt it would, since I remembered everything I had been taught. Whatever was happening with our neighbors, however nearby, took place beyond our borders, and to me, news of it evoked only surprise, tinged with disdain, while confirming our superiority in my eyes. Besides that, my uncle and Marcellin Duprat and all of my teachers at school were unanimous in affirming that a dictatorship had no chance of enduring, since it did not benefit from the consent of the people. To Ambrose Fleury, the people was a sacred notion, one that came with the fall of Mussolini, Hitler, and Franco all wrapped up inside it. No one saw Fascism and Nazism as popular regimes. Such an idea would have been an actual negation of the very building blocks of my mandatory public education. My guardian’s resolute pacifism had done the rest. Certainly, at times I sensed a kind of confusion in him, and contradictory feelings; in this way he admired Léon Blum for refusing to intervene in the war in Spain, while Munich had left him overcome by fury. On that occasion, I ended up concluding that despite all his efforts, he had succumbed to the Fleury “historical memory,” and that even the many years he had spent in his peaceful job as a rural postman were not enough to prevent the occasional relapse.

  And so I couldn’t have been more poorly prepared for the sight of the Europe I crossed in 1939. At the Italian border, which was overrun with black shirts, daggers, and Fascist emblems, I had my pocketknife confiscated, though it was barely three inches long. The steps outside of railway stations echoed with the footsteps of military detachments; a compatriot translated a Malaparte editorial for me that compared “degenerate France” to a submissive girl. Just after we crossed over the Austrian border, a small, sad, bald man who had taken a seat in my compartment was asked to leave the train, which he did in tears. Swastikas were everywhere, on flags, armbands, and walls, and from every poster, Hitler’s gaze met mine. When my passport and visas were checked and it emerged that I was traveling to Poland, eyes hardened and papers were returned to me with a brusque gesture and a look of contempt. Twice, the windows of the train car were covered over with a special adhesive and cameras were collected and held for the duration of that leg of the journey; doubtless the train was passing through some “military zone.” Some SS officers who had taken seats across from me on the way from Vienna to Bratislava glanced with amusement at my French beret and saluted me with a triumphant “Sieg heil” on their way out.

  At the train’s first stop in Poland, the atmosphere transformed abruptly and completely. Even my beret seemed to have changed expression, if not personality: the Polish passengers kept giving it friendly looks. Those who knew no French and had no other way to demonstrate their fellowship clapped me on the shoulder, shook my hand, and shared their beer and food with me. On the way to Warsaw, and then, once I changed trains, all along the “Corridor” that followed the Vistula River to the Baltic, I heard “Vive la France!” more times than ever before in all my life.

  The Bronickis had cabled to say they would meet me at the station, and, as soon as the conductor came to tell me we were approaching Gródek, I left my third-class coach and moved to the first-class one, where I prepared to descend in a fittingly dignified manner. Marcellin Duprat had lent me a real leather suitcase. Reminding me that, after all, “You’ll be representing France over there,” he’d also suggested that I affix the three-star tricolor insignia of the Clos Joli to my jacket lapel, or even my beret. I had pretended to accept it, but then left it in my pocket — at the time I hadn’t even the slightest premonition that it would one day constitute the last universally recognized distinction of my country. Famous as he was, it would not have occurred to anyone to consider Marcellin Duprat a visionary — “France’s three stars,” as the master chef called them, did not yet shine with anywhere near the same brilliance as they do today.

  With the exception of a few farmers and their crates, almost no one remained in the train as it pulled up to Gródek’s little redbrick station. However, they appeared to be expecting some sort of official visit, for as I set foot on the steps, I found myself surrounded by a military marching band composed of some dozen men. I also saw that the station roof had been decorated with crossed French and Polish flags, and as soon as I’d stepped forward with my suitcase, the band struck up “La Marseillaise,” followed by the Polish national anthem. Rapidly removing my beret, I stood and listened at attention, all the while glancing around in the hopes of catching a glimpse of whatever French celebrity was being welcomed in this manner. I could see Stas Bronicki, bareheaded, his hat over his heart, listening to the national anthem; Lila waved at me; Tad, with eyes lowered, struggled visibly to keep from laughing; behind them, Bruno regarded me with a smile of both friendship and embarrassment, looking, as usual, a little bit lost. I figured it out only when a little girl bedecked with tricolor ribbons presented me with a bouquet of blue, white, and red flowers and articulated very carefully, in French: “Vive la France éternelle et l’amitié immortelle du peuple français et du peuple polonais!” which seemed to me to be a lot of eternity and immortality all at once. Following a moment of panic when I finally grasped that I was the object of this quasiofficial welcome — it was the first time I had ever represented France in another country — I responded bravely and in Polish, “Niech zyje Polska! Vive la Pologne!”

  The little girl burst into tears, the musicians from the brass band broke ranks and came over to shake my hand, Stas Bronicki grabbed me in a hug, Lila threw her arms around my neck, Bruno pecked me on the cheek and slipped away, and, as soon as everyone’s patriotic enthusiasm had settled down, Tad took my arm and whispered in my ear, “You see, it’s like we’ve already won!”

  Such a note of distress sounded from his mocking tone that I felt indignant in my new role representing France; I pulled my arm away and retorted, “My dear Tad, there is what we call cynicism, and there is what we call history in France and Poland. The two do not go together.”

 
; “Besides, there won’t be any war,” Bronicki put in. “Hitler’s regime is on the verge of collapse.”

  “I believe I remember Churchill saying something about that to the British Parliament right around the time of the Munich pact,” growled Tad. “He said, ‘You were given the choice between war and dishonor. You chose dishonor and you will have war.’”

  I was holding Lila’s hand in mine. “Well then, we’ll win it,” I said, and was rewarded with a kiss on the cheek.

  I could practically feel the weight of the crown of Frenchness on my head. When I recalled that Marcellin Duprat had dared to suggest that I travel to Poland with the insignia of the Clos Joli sewn to my chest, I regretted not having given him a good pair of slaps. Feeding all the big wheels of the Third Republic at his little restaurant had caused the good cook to lose sight of the true meaning of his country’s grandeur, and all it represented in the eyes of the world. On the way from the station to the château, in an old Ford Bronicki drove himself — the blue Packard had been seized by creditors in Cléry — with Lila at my arm, I gave my friends the latest news from France. Never had the nation felt so sure of itself. Hitler’s ranting was risible. There was not a single trace of nervousness anywhere, nor even apprehension. The entire country, peacefully confident in its strength, seemed to have acquired a new character trait, a phlegmatic cool once attributed to the British.