by Romain Gary
I sat down beside him. I must have looked pretty terrible, because he smiled, turned a page, and read:
Ich weiss nicht, was soll es bedeuten
Dass ich so traurig bin;
Ein Märchen aus alten Zeiten
Das kommt mir nicht aus dem Sinn …
And then he added, laughing, “The translation doesn’t matter — Verlaine said more or less the same thing:
Je me souviens
Des jours anciens
Et je pleure …*
He set the book down beside him.
“So, tell me.”
He listened attentively, nodding occasionally.
“They’re right. Tell them I understand perfectly.”
He rose. I knew I was seeing him for the last time. And that I would never forget the light playing around the face of my “enemy.” Cursed memory. It was one of spring’s most beautiful days, with a serenity and warmth that transformed nature into a foreign power.
“Please tell your friends to come for me here — before nightfall, if possible. It’s a question of … hygiene. There are a lot of insects.”
He grew silent and waited; for the first time, I read a trace of anxiety in his face. He didn’t even dare ask the question.
I don’t know if I was lying to him or to myself when I answered: “She must be in Spain by now — you can set your mind at ease.”
His face lit up. “Phew. That’s one less thing to worry about.”
I left him. Right up to the end, we remained faithful to our childhood: we did not shake hands.
The next day, Souba brought me the Heine book and the locket with Lila’s photo. They turned the rest in to the police. The Maheu kid had stumbled over the body in a ravine, in a place called Vieille-Source, while gathering lilies of the valley; that was the story they gave.
* * *
* No indeed, the translation doesn’t matter; Gerard Manley Hopkins said more or less the same thing: “Margaret, are you grieving / Over Goldengrove unleaving? / … / It is the blight man was born for, / It is Margaret you mourn for.” —Tr.
43
Soon after, Souba also was the one to give me news of my uncle. He came to see me one Sunday, in a getup he himself qualified as unsafe: he dreamed of dressing in uniform, a real French uniform, “out in the open” — he was a reserve officer, as he constantly reminded us. He never specified his rank; most likely he had set aside some stripes for later, just in case. In a beret, boots, cavalry breeches, and a khaki battle jacket, his fat face looking as sullen as ever — his fury at the moment of capitulation seemed to have marked his facial features with a permanent angry expression — Souba sat down heavily on a stool and, without preamble, declared gruffly to me: “He’s at Buchenwald.”
Back then I knew very little about the death camps. My mind did not yet feel the word “deportation” with all its horrible weight. But I’d believed my uncle to be safe and sound in the Cévennes, and the shock hit me so hard that Souba took one look at me and got up, returning with a bottle of calvados and placing a glass in my hands.
“Come on, pull yourself together.”
“But what did he do?”
“Something with Jews,” Souba grumbled darkly. “Jewish kids, from what I understand. Apparently there’s a whole village devoted to it, in the Cévennes. Can’t remember what it’s called. A Huguenot village. Those people were really persecuted in their day, so they all got involved, and from what I hear they’ve kept up with it, even now. And of course Jewish or no, if there are kids, Ambrose Fleury will wade right in, with the kites and all that.”
“All that.”
“Yep, all that.” He tapped the side of his head. “Well, we’re all certified these days. You have to be crazy to risk your life for others, because we might not be around to see France when it’s free. With me though, it isn’t my head —” he touched his belly, “— it’s in my guts.
“So I can’t help it. If it were in my head, I’d make arrangements — like Duprat. Well, anyway, the point is they deported him. They pinched him between Lyon and the Swiss border.”
“With children?”
“Not a goddamn clue. I’ve got someone who’s just come from there who can give you details. I’ll introduce you. Get up. I’ll take you.”
I rode behind him on my bike, crying from my nose. It’s no use, wanting to hold back tears — they always find their way out.
Monsieur Terrier was waiting for us at Le Normand, in Clos, and Souba presented him to me. During a bombing, he’d taken a uniform from a fallen German soldier and escaped with the help of what he called “a perfect knowledge of the language of Goethe, which I taught at the Lycée Henri IV.” First he described what he, bizarrely enough, termed “camp life,” and then told me that even under the worst duress, my uncle never gave in to despair.
“True, he lucked out in the beginning …”
“What luck is that, sir?” I yelled out.
Monsieur Terrier explained about my uncle’s luck. It so happened that one of the camp guards had spent a year stationed with the Occupation forces in the Cléry area and remembered Ambrose Fleury’s kites, which the Germans would come to admire, and often purchased to send back home to their families. The camp commander, with the idea of using inmate labor, had supplied him with the necessary materials. My uncle was ordered to go to work. At first, the SS officers brought the kites home as presents for their children or their friends’ children, and then he came up with the idea of turning it into a business. My uncle ended up with an entire team of assistants. And thus, floating above the shameful camp, it was possible to see bouquets of kites whose gay colors seemed to proclaim the inextinguishable hope and faith of Ambrose Fleury. Monsieur Terrier told me that my uncle worked from memory, and that he had managed to make some pieces look like Rabelais and Montaigne, which he’d assembled so many times. But the highest demand was for kites in the naive shapes of children’s book characters, and the Nazis even furnished my uncle with a whole collection of juvenile literature and fairy tales, to help out his imagination.
“We liked him a lot, good old Ambrose,” Monsieur Terrier said. “Of course he was a bit original, not to say a little touched — at his age, and undernourished as we all were, there’s no other way he could have come up with such carefree, jolly shapes and colors and expressions for those creatures. He was a man who didn’t know how to despair, and the ones among us who expected that nothing but death would deliver us felt humiliated and almost defied by his strength of soul. I believe the image has been burned into my eyes: that untamable man, in our concentration camp stripes, surrounded by a few shreds of human being who were hanging on to their lives with something that has no body. I can still see him steering a ship with twenty white sails at the end of the lead, fluttering above the crematoria and over the heads of our torturers. Sometimes a kite would get away — it would fly toward the horizon and our eyes would follow it with hope. Over the months, your uncle must have assembled three hundred kites. Like I said, most of his ideas came from children’s stories the camp commander gave him. Those were the most popular.
“And then it went bad. You haven’t heard the business about the lampshades made out of human skin. Not yet. You will. But to make a long story short, Ilse Koch, a beast who was a guard in the women’s camp, had them making her lampshades from the skins of dead prisoners. No, don’t make that face: it doesn’t prove anything. And it never will prove anything, however much proof there is. All we’ll ever need is one Jean Moulin, or a single d’Estienne d’Orves and the defense will have the stand again. So as I was saying, it was Ilse Koch who came up with the idea: she asked Ambrose Fleury to make her a kite out of human skin. Oh, yes. She had found one with some nice tattoos. Now, obviously, Ambrose Fleury said no. Ilse Koch stared at him for a second, and then she said: “Denke doch. Think about it.” She walked away, with her famous whip, and y
our uncle watched her go. I think that our foe had figured out the meaning of the kites and had decided to break the spirit of this Frenchman who didn’t know how to despair. All that night, we tried to talk Ambrose into it: what was one more or one less skin? No one was keeping score in this skin game; we’d lost count. And at any rate, this particular guy wasn’t in it anymore. But he wouldn’t hear of it. “I couldn’t do that to them,” he kept saying. He didn’t actually say who “he couldn’t do that” to, but we understood what he meant. I don’t know what his kites meant to him. Maybe some kind of invincible hope.”
Monsieur Terrier trailed off, a little uncomfortably. Brusquely, Souba stood up and went over to the bar to discuss something with the owner. I understood.
“They killed him.”
“Oh no, no, I can reassure you on that count,” Monsieur Terrier hurried to console me. “They just transferred him to another camp.”
“Where?”
“In Oświęcim, in Poland.”
I didn’t know it then, but as is only fitting, the world would eventually know Oświęcim far better by a German name — Auschwitz.
44
Two months have passed since Lila went back to sharing my life underground. By sleeping little — this state of nervous exhaustion favors her presence — I manage to bring her to me nearly every night.
“You warned me just in time, Ludo. Thank goodness, Georg had arranged for our paperwork and I could flee with my parents, first to Spain, then Portugal …”
A few times a week I go to the Cléry public library to be closer to her. Leaning over the atlas, one finger on the map, I keep her company, in Estoril and the Algarve, celebrated for its forests of cork trees.
“You should come here, Ludo. It’s such a beautiful country.”
“Write to me. You talk with me, you comfort me, but when you leave me, you leave me with no sign of life. You’ve not done anything silly, at least?”
“Anything silly? I’ve done so many silly things.”
“You know … First off I had to survive, save my own …”
Here, her voice becomes severe. “See — you think about it all the time. You’ve never really forgiven me, deep down.”
“That’s not true. If I don’t want it to happen to you again, it’s that —”
Her voice takes on a mocking tone, “— it’s that you’re afraid it’ll become a habit for me.”
“Not a habit … A hopelessness.”
“You’d be ashamed of me.”
“Oh, no! Sometimes I’m ashamed to be a man, to have the same hands, the same face as them …”
“Who’s them? The Germans?”
“Them. Us. You need a lot of faith in my uncle Ambrose’s kites to look any man in the eye and say: he is innocent. He’s not the one who tortured Jombey to death, he’s not the one who commanded the firing squad last week, when they shot six ‘communist’ hostages to death …”
The voice sounds far off, now.
“What do you want? First off you have to survive, to save your own. Do you understand, Ludo? Do you understand?”
I get up, I take the lamp, I cross the courtyard to the workshop. They’re all there, always the same, and yet you always have to start again. I must have reassembled them twenty-odd times each: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Montaigne. There’s even Don Quixote, that great, misunderstood realist, who was so right to perceive hideous dragons and monsters in the familiar, tranquil-seeming world — ones that had perfected their camouflage, successfully learned to hide behind the faces of nice guys “who wouldn’t hurt a fly.” Since the dawn of humanity, the number of “flies” who got their wings ripped off thanks to that reassuring cliché must be up in the hundreds of millions. Long ago all trace of hatred for the Germans deserted me. What if Nazism isn’t an inhuman monstrosity? What if it’s human? What if it’s a confession, a hidden truth, suppressed, camouflaged, denied, crouching deep within us, but always ready to reappear in the end? The Germans, yes of course, the Germans … It’s their turn in history, that’s all. We’ll see, after the war, once Germany has been defeated and Nazism has bolted or been buried, whether other peoples, in Europe, in Asia, in Africa, in America, don’t pick up the torch. A comrade over from London brought us a chapbook of poems by a French diplomat, Louis Roché. He wrote this verse about after the war, and it will remain forever in my memory:
The dawn it will be pearly,
But heed your mother as she croons:
There will be colossal killing
Before the bells toll noon.
I light my lamp. The kites are still there, but flying them is still forbidden. At head height, no higher — that’s the rule. The authorities fear signs in the sky, they fear a code, messages exchanged, location markers, signals to the Resistance. Children barely have the right to drag them along by a string. No rising up. It’s painful to see our Jean-Jacques or our Montaigne dragging over the ground, it’s hard to see them crawling. Someday, they’ll be free to take off again, in pursuit of the blue yonder. Then they’ll begin to reassure us about ourselves again — to shake off these earthly pursuits and pursuers. Maybe kites don’t have any real reason to exist other than this one: to put on airs and look heavenly.
I never let myself get too far out of hand. It was simply an instinct for self-preservation: whether it really was a sacred folly or the Fleurys were just plain crazy didn’t matter much. What counted was the act of faith. There is no other key to survival. “Do you understand, Ludo? Do you understand?” I would wipe my eyes and go on.
Sometimes a few children still came and helped me when their parents’ backs were turned: La Motte was three miles from Cléry and everyone was frugal about shoes. We would assemble kites, setting them aside for the future.
And then one morning I got a message from the Lady Esterhazy. She continued to come to the Clos Joli regularly, despite the cruel loss she was grieving: Chong had died. She told me the news herself, her eyes still reddened. “I’m going to buy myself a dachshund,” she concluded, sniffing into her handkerchief. “You’ve got to keep up appearances.”
It was May 12, 1944. During the lunch hour, my office door opened and Francis Dupré’s face appeared at the door. With his padded shoulders, his slicked-back hair, his unnaturally long eyelashes, and his big tender eyes, he seemed like a character straight out of a Tino Rossi film. No doubt he had a decent dose of his “medication” in his veins, for he was in grand form. Madame Julie must’ve been “not forgetting” him rather carefully; times were more and more dangerous and the Gestapo was visibly nervous. The Gräfin needed her “100 percent Aryan” friend more than ever, and he could not let himself forget her, either. It’s hard to imagine a reciprocal dependence more absolute — or more tragic.
“How are things, young man?” He came and sat down on my desk. “You should watch out, my friend. I saw a little list the other day, with names on it. Some of them were marked with an ‘X.’ Yours just had a question mark. So be careful.”
I was silent. He swung one of his legs.
“I’m pretty worried myself. My friend, Commander Arnoldt, is expecting a transfer to Germany at any minute. I don’t know what I’ll do without him.”
“Well, you could follow him to Germany.”
“I don’t see how.”
“Surely he’ll find a way.”
I shouldn’t have allowed myself to be so bitchy, because Isidore Lefkowitz became very pale.
“I’m sorry, Monsieur Dupré.”
“It’s nothing. I didn’t know she’d told you.”
“I’ve been told nothing. As for that question mark by my name … I’ve done nothing wrong.”
“It all depends on the point of view from which one regards the idea one has of things …”
I finished the sentence: “… for the most perspicacious and circumspect of men is no less subject to a quantity of necess
ities whose importance is not in any way diminished by their lack of consequence.”
We both began laughing. It was a silly game of rhetoric that every high school student knew.
“Janson de Sailly, year ten,” he murmured. “My God, it all feels like it was so long ago, now!” He lowered his voice. “She wants to see you. At three o’clock this afternoon, in front of Le Manoir des Jars.
“Why at the manor? Why not at her house?”
“She has errands to run and it’s on the way. And …” He glanced down at his manicured fingernails, “I have no idea what’s come over him, but dear old Grüber has gone completely over the top. Can you imagine, the day before yesterday, he had the audacity to search the countess’s villa.”
“No,” I said, my heart in my throat.
I thought of Odette Lanier the “chambermaid” and our transceiver.
“Unbelievable, isn’t it? Just a formality, of course. I’d let her know about it, in fact. There’s a storm brewing, clearly. There’s even word of an imminent landing … My friend Franz — Commander Arnoldt — has a lot on his mind. The English and the Americans, if they dare such a thing, will obviously be tossed back into the sea. Well, one has to hope.”
“We’re living off hope.”
We exchanged a long look and he departed.
It was one thirty in the afternoon. I couldn’t sit still; I was at the manor an hour early. The ruins of what had been the Bronickis’ Norman Turquerie were overgrown with weeds, and had taken on a curiously premeditated look, as if they’d been placed there with a studied abandon by some thoughtful artistic plan.
I was aware that the petrol shortage had sent us back to the age of the horse and carriage, but all the same, I was astonished to see Julie Espinoza pull up in a yellow phaeton, seated behind a coachman dressed in a blue livery and feathered Gibus hat. She descended majestically from the contraption, holding her head up beneath a two-story red wig, her bust thrown out like a ship’s prow and her bottom like the stern. She had on a corseted dress of the kind no longer found anywhere but on postcards from the Belle Époque. Her virile-featured face looked even more determined than usual. With her pack of Gauloises in hand and a half-smoked cigarette dangling out of the corner of her mouth, she looked like a mind-boggling cross between Toulouse-Lautrec’s La Goulue, a distinguished lady, and a firefighter. I could only stare at her stupidly as she explained. She sounded angry, which with her was a sure sign she was nervous.