The Kites

by Romain Gary

  I left La Motte at four in the morning: I had to go to Ronce, to see Soubabère. We were supposed to map out some new landing strips together. Also, I wanted to let our comrades know they should steer clear of La Motte for a while. As I set out from the house, I noticed the lights were still on in the workshop. With no little irritation, I remarked to myself that you had to be a real bullheaded Frenchman to be assembling kites in such a despicable time. Children had always been their best friends. If Ambrose Fleury took it into his head to launch his Montaigne or his Pascal into the sky right now, it seemed to me that the sky would spit it right back in his face.

  I returned to the house the next day, at around eleven in the morning. I walked the last few miles, pushing my bicycle. I had already patched up both tires a dozen times, and I had to make thrift of what was left. I’d arrived at the place known as Le Petit Passage, where there’s now a monument to Jean Vigot, sixteen, who was arrested by the Milice just after the Allied landing with his weapons at the ready, and was shot dead on the spot. I stopped to light a cigarette, but it fell from my lips.

  There in the sky above La Motte, were seven kites. Seven yellow kites. Seven kites in the form of Jewish stars. I dropped my bike and began to run. My uncle Ambrose stood in the meadow in front of the house, surrounded by a few kids from Clos. His eyes were raised to the sky, at those seven stars of shame floating there. Jaws tightened, brow furrowed, his hardened face clenched between his gray crew cut and his mustache, the old man looked like a figurehead that had lost its ship. The children, five boys and a little girl — I knew them all, the Fourniers, the Blancs, and the Bossis — all looked grave.

  I murmured, “They’re going to come …”

  But it was the others who came first. Oh, not many of them: the Cailleux, the Monniers, and old man Simon. He was the first to take off his cap.

  My uncle was arrested that evening, and held for fifteen days. It was Marcellin Duprat who got him out. All of us were certified, in the Fleury family, from father to son — it was a known fact, he explained to them. A hereditary madness. It was what they used to call “the French sickness,” it came from way back. You couldn’t take us seriously, or if you did, you were risking serious trouble. Duprat pulled every string, and he had a lot of them to pull, from Otto Abetz to Fernand de Brinon. The day after the arrest, Grüber’s Citroën stopped in front of the house, followed by a truck full of soldiers. They threw all the kites into the meadow and set them on fire. Grüber, his hands clasped behind his back, watched as the flames consumed what old French hands had so lovingly assembled.

  La Motte was searched like never before. Grüber had recognized the enemy. He went at it himself, nosing around everywhere, as if there were something palpable, something physical he could destroy. My uncle was released on a Sunday. Marcellin Duprat brought him back to La Motte. Upon seeing the empty workshop, all his creations turned to smoke, his first words were, “Well, let’s get back to work.”

  The first kite he assembled represented a village against a backdrop of mountains, surrounded by a map of France so that you could tell exactly where it was. The name of the village was Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, and it was in the Cévennes. My uncle didn’t explain why he had chosen this village in particular. All he would say to me was: “Le Chambon. Remember that name.”

  I didn’t get it. Why take an interest in this village, where he’d probably never set foot? Why look up at a Le Chambon-sur-Lignon kite with such pride as it flew in the sky? I kept on asking, but all I got out of him was: “I heard about it in prison.”

  My surprise had only just begun. A few weeks later, having reassembled a few of his historical pieces, my uncle announced he was leaving Clos.

  “Where are you going?”

  “To Chambon. Like I told you, it’s in the Cévennes.”

  “Christ on a crutch, what’s going on here? Why Le Chambon? Why the Cévennes?”

  He smiled. There were now as many wrinkles on his face as there were hairs in his mustache.

  “Because they need me over there.”

  That evening, after supper, he kissed me.

  “I’ll be leaving very early in the morning. Don’t give up, Ludo.”

  “Don’t worry.”

  “She’ll be back. There will be a lot to forgive her.”

  When I woke up, he was gone. He had taken his toolbox with him. On the table in the workshop, he had left me a note: “Don’t give up on her.” I couldn’t tell whether he was talking about Lila or France.

  Only a few months before the Allied landing did I get any answer to the questions I was constantly asking myself: Why Le Chambon? Why did Ambrose Fleury take his toolbox and leave us for that place, for that village in the Cévennes?

  Le Chambon-sur-Lignon was a village where, under the leadership of Pastor André Trocmé and his wife Magda, and with the help of the entire population, several hundred Jewish children were saved from deportation. For four years, all of life in Chambon revolved around that task. I’ll write once more those names of great faith: Le Chambon-sur-Lignon and its inhabitants. And today, if any forgetting about this subject has taken place, let it be known that we, the Fleurys, have always been prodigious rememberers. They say exercise is good for the heart, so I recite their names often, without forgetting a single one.

  But back then, on the day I received a photograph of my uncle in Le Chambon, a kite in hand, surrounded by children, I knew none of that. Written across the back were the words, “All is well here.” “Here” was underlined.

  39

  I hadn’t heard from Lila, but Germany was retreating from the Russian front and its army had been defeated in Africa. Resistance had ceased to be “folly”; reason was beginning to catch up to the heart. Marcellin Duprat himself now took part in our secret meetings, even as his standing with the authorities reached its zenith: in May 1943 the idea of naming him mayor of Cléry had even been mentioned. He refused.

  “There is history and there is permanence, and then there are things that come and go, like politics. It’s important to know which is which,” he explained to us.

  The celebrity of the master of the Clos Joli had at least as much to do with the occupier’s fascination with him as it did with the quality of his cuisine. He had an erudition and a way with words, as well as a personal dignity that came not only from his actual physical bearing but also from the task he’d set for himself in the midst of terrible hardship and the calm confidence with which he’d shouldered it — these things impressed even the people who, in the beginning, had called him a collaborator. The man who held him in the highest esteem was General von Tiele. The two of them had a curious relationship, one you could almost call a friendship. The general, it was rumored, looked down his nose at the Nazis. One day, he had remarked to Suzanne, “Mademoiselle, you are aware that the führer claims that the fruits of his labor will last a thousand years. If you ask me, I would rather bet on those of Marcellin Duprat. And they will certainly have a better taste.”

  Once, as the Luftwaffe’s chief was arriving, a lieutenant permitted himself to announce him by saying: “Herr Duprat, one of your greatest connoisseurs can thus personally confirm that France has lost nothing of what defines its genius.”

  Von Tiele, who was present at the time, took the officer aside and poured several ounces of invective over him. The man, standing at attention as he listened, went very pale. After this, the general came and presented his personal apologies to Marcellin. When I saw the general arm in arm with Marcellin, strolling around the little garden of the Clos Joli as they chatted, I sensed that the two men had managed to surmount what Duprat disdainfully called either “the circumstances” or “the contingencies,” and had found some common ground, where a Prussian aristocrat and a great French chef could speak on equal footing. But I didn’t fully understand how far these two elite natures had gone — not only in their mutual appreciation, but in a kind of real bond
above the fray — until the day I learned from Lucien Duprat that his father was secretly giving cooking lessons to the general Graf von Tiele. At first, I didn’t want to believe it.

  “You’re kidding me. Von Tiele must have other things on his mind right now.”

  “Well, maybe that’s why. Come and see.”

  I shrugged. If someone had told me that the general played violin to take his mind off things, I would have found that unremarkable: a taste for music has always been one of the best-known and most widely recognized clichés of the German soul. And nothing has been more convenient, during and since the Occupation, than reducing Germany to its crimes and France to its heroes. But that one of the most prestigious commanders of the Wehrmacht might, deep down, be so convinced that defeat was nigh that he would seek oblivion in cooking lessons from a French master chef — this seemed to contradict everything that the term “German general” signified to us. Hatred feeds on generalizations, and nothing sets us more at ease than a “typical Prussian face” or a “perfect specimen of the race of overlords” when the time comes to broaden our field of ignorance.

  My questioning of Lucien Duprat bordered on the brutal.

  “Your father said so, huh? That’s just the kind of thing he’d come up with to make himself seem more important — that’s him in a nutshell. ‘Yessir, ladies and gentlemen, that’s right: you know General von Tiele, the victor at Sedan and Smolensk? I taught him everything he knows.’”

  “I’m telling you, the general comes for cooking lessons with my father two or three times a week. Obviously he doesn’t want word to get out, since things have been going seriously downhill for them — it might seem a little desperate. Even defeatist. They started with fried eggs and omelets. I don’t see what’s so surprising to you about that.”

  “Nothing surprises me. The rest of us are up to our ears in shit and blood and these two panjandrums are communing with each other above the barbarous fray. German power needs French finesse and fine living. Goddamn, I’d like to see that.”

  “I’ll let you know.”

  That very day, I was leaving the restaurant’s business offices when Lucien whispered to me, “Tonight, around eleven. I’ll leave the hallway door open a crack. But keep quiet. They’re very good friends and my father would never forgive me for this.”

  I went over on foot. I feared the patrols that had begun roving through the meadows and woods each night in search of airdrop lamps.

  I slipped into the hallway that led to the kitchen. The door was ajar. I crept forward, shoes in hand, and peeked inside.

  Von Tiele was in shirtsleeves, an apron wrapped around him. He appeared to be well soused. Beside him, Marcellin Duprat, haughty and stiff beneath his chef’s toque, was in a state of excessive dignity also attributable to the two empty bottles of Pomerol sitting on the table alongside a significantly tapped bottle of cognac.

  “There’s no point in coming here if you don’t listen to what I tell you, Georg,” Duprat grumbled. “You’ve got no particular gift for this, and if you don’t follow my instructions to the letter you’ll never come to anything.”

  “But I learned it off by heart. A glass and half of white wine …”

  “Which white wine?”

  The general went silent, looking slightly befuddled.

  “Dry!” Duprat scolded. “A glass and a half of dry white wine! Good God, man, it’s not all that complicated!”

  “Marcellin, you’re not telling me it will be completely fouled up if the white wine isn’t dry?”

  “If you want to make a real Norman-style stuffed rabbit, the white wine has to be dry. Otherwise it’s just bilge. And what in the name of all that’s holy did you put in the stuffing this time? I can’t believe you. I do not understand, Georg, how a man of your learning …”

  “It’s not the same learning, Marcellin. That’s why we need each other … I put in three rabbit livers, a hundred grams of cooked ham, fifty grams of fresh breadcrumbs … a cup of chives …”

  You could hear the groan of the Allied bombers flying up the coast.

  “Is that it? My dear general, your mind is clearly elsewhere. In Stalingrad, most likely. I told you to put in a teaspoon of allspice … We’ll start over again tomorrow.”

  “This is the third time I’ve failed.”

  “Well, you can’t win the battle on every front.”

  The two men were completely drunk. For the first time, I was struck by their resemblance. Von Tiele was smaller, but they had almost the same fine-featured face, the same little gray mustache. Disgustedly, Duprat pushed away the dish with the offending rabbit in it.

  “Pure shit.”

  “Yes, well, I’d like to see you command a tank corps, Marcellin.”

  They were quiet for a moment, each one as somber as the other, and then they passed the cognac bottle again.

  “How much longer will this go on, Georg?”

  “I don’t know, old man. Someone will win the war, that’s certain. Probably your Norman-style rabbit.”

  Cautiously, I departed. The very next day, a message was sent off, alerting London that the commanding general of the Panzer corps in Normandy was beginning to show signs of weakened morale.

  Chong the Pekinese should have been awarded an official title as liaison for the French Resistance. Each time his mistress came to pick him up in my office — except when Monsieur Jean or Marcellin Duprat himself paid their respects by seeing her out — she passed me information on what was cooking with the Gestapo or gave me details of the German “welcome preparations” along the Atlantic Wall. Several of our comrades owed their lives to these warnings. The Gräfin also apprised me that Lila was living in Paris with her parents, but that she regularly spent time in a villa near Huet.

  Lila soon reappeared at the Clos Joli, always in the company of Hans and von Tiele. We called them “the trio.” “Reserve a table for the trio at one,” Lucien Duprat would call out. I always learned of her presence from Monsieur Jean, who would assume an apologetic air as he let me know. The “little lady” was there with her Germans, it must be breaking poor Ludo’s heart. It wasn’t. They say that love is blind, but that wasn’t the case for me; quite the contrary, in fact. There was something about the trio’s interactions that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. I was certain that Lila was not von Tiele’s mistress and I wasn’t even convinced that she was Hans’s. In my head, the comical phrase “our estates neighbored each other on the Baltic,” which she’d snapped at me to explain her relationship with her German “cousins” was beginning to resemble those “personal messages” we received from London: “The birds will sing again this evening” or “The sunken cathedral will ring its bells at midnight.” These two Prussian squires and this no less aristocratic Polish girl had a kind of complicity whose true nature I could glimpse, but not quite grasp. Once, I happened to run into Lila as she left the place with her two Junkers. I hadn’t seen her for several months and was struck by the change that had come over her. The proud and almost triumphant expression on her face when she saw me seemed to say, “You’ll see Ludo, you’ll see. You were wrong about me.”

  My impression was confirmed the following week — and in the most puzzling of ways. Lila breezed into my office, and, before I even had time to stand up, she was kissing me.

  “Well, my Ludo, what have you been doing with yourself?”

  It had been years since I’d seen her so cheerful and happy.

  “I don’t know what I’m doing with myself, actually. Not much. I keep the books at the Clos Joli and I see to the kites, when I have the time. My uncle’s gone, and I’m doing the best I can.”

  “Where did he go?”

  “Le Chambon-sur-Lignon. It’s in the Cévennes. Don’t ask me what he’s off doing at the other end of the country — I have no idea. All he told me is that they need him over there. So he took his toolbox and he le
ft.”

  I could tell she wanted to talk to me, that she was holding back; I could even detect a hint of irony in her eyes, as if she pitied my ignorance as to what was making her so happy.

  “Hans has been posted to the staff headquarters in East Prussia,” she told me.

  “Ah!”

  She laughed. “You couldn’t care less, naturally.”

  “That’s the very least you could say.”

  “Well, you’re wrong. It’s very important. I have a lot of influence over Hans, you know.”

  “I don’t doubt it.”

  “Great things are afoot, Ludo. You’ll know soon.”

  I sensed that she wanted to tell me more. I also sensed that it would be better if she didn’t.

  “You always thought I had a foolish heart — ever since you met me. And I know what people say about me around here. You’re wrong to listen to them.”

  “I listen to no one.”

  “You’re wrong about me, my little Ludo.”

  “But …”

  “You’ll apologize to me soon enough. I think I’m finally going to pull off something extraordinary in my life. I always said I would, as a matter of fact.”

  She gave me a quick kiss and departed, stopping at the door, of course, to glance triumphantly back at me.

  A few days later, I saw her at the Cléry train station, getting out of a car, accompanied by von Tiele. She waved at me and I waved back.

  40

  On May 8, 1943, at around ten o’clock at night, as I sat reading, I heard a car pull up. Walking to the window, I saw the blue gleam of headlights. The motor stopped; there was a knock at the door; I lit a candle and opened it. General von Tiele was standing on the doorstep; his eyes, which were what people would conventionally call “steel gray,” looked out with a pale fixedness from his precise face, with its clean lines. He wore his Iron Cross, studded with diamonds, around his neck.