The Kites

by Romain Gary

  This time, the applause lasted a good minute. Madame Espinoza wiped her eyes.

  “One more thing. Someone is missing from this table. A friend, a great soul, a man who did not know how to despair. You guessed it: I’m talking about Ambrose Fleury. We miss him. Ludo, I know how your heart must be grieved. But let’s not lose courage. We may get him back. Perhaps we’ll see him appear again among us, the man who was able to express, with such constancy, through the kindly art of the kite, everything that remains eternally pure and inalterable on this earth. I raise my glass to you, Ambrose Fleury. Wherever you are, know that your spiritual son is continuing your work, and, thanks to that, the French skies will never be empty!”

  It was true that I had returned to our workshop. Never, since my uncle’s departure, had it been so active. The country needed to rebuild its spirits, and orders were coming in from all over. Our stock had suffered a lot and we more or less had to start from scratch. Most of the pieces had been burned, but the ones my uncle had managed to hide with neighbors, a good fifty of them, served as our models. They had been poorly cared for, however, and they, too, had wasted away and lost their shapes and colors. I knew the craft and worked quickly. The only question was whether, after all that I had seen and experienced, I might be lacking in inspiration. A kite requires a great deal of innocence. There was also the problem of supplies, and we were penniless. Duprat helped us a bit — it was vital, he said, to maintain this local attraction — but it was Madame Julie Espinoza who really got us afloat again. In liberated Paris, Madame Julie turned over the brightest new leaf of her career, the one that would, in the thirty years that followed, make her the celebrity she is today. I had hesitated a little — I wondered what my uncle would have thought if he’d known that our kites were being financed, after a fashion, by Paris’s number one madam. But patronage has always existed, and it seemed to me that if I refused this help because of where it came from, I would end up in league with those people who sanctify what we do between the sheets, making them into the twin sources of good and evil. So we went to see Madame Julie in Paris. She had set herself up in the beautiful apartment she’d managed to have requisitioned for herself, decorated in the style of Louis XV. She served us tea and we chatted about her problems with the competition, particularly from Le Chabanais and 122 rue de Provence — she was indignant that the same houses that had entertained the Germans had stayed open for business and were now entertaining the Americans.

  “They’ve got a lot of damn nerve, some of these ladies,” she growled.

  I saw that she was all the more ready to help because, the day before, she had witnessed an admirable scene between Duprat and Madame Fabienne, the madam at the rue de Miromesnil. She had come to lunch at the Clos Joli in the company of the American military attaché, and she’d had the nerve to inform Duprat that he had not been the only one, as he liked to put it, “to remain at his post.”

  Duprat had flown into a black rage.

  “Madame,” he had shouted, “if you don’t see the difference between a paragon of civilization and a bordello, I must ask you to leave at once!”

  Madame Fabienne didn’t budge. She was a small, myopic woman with a thin smile.

  “And may I point out to you,” Duprat had roared, “that right here, under the very noses of the Germans, I took in Resistance fighters and Allied pilots!”

  “Well, Monsieur Duprat, I can claim some merit in that department, as well. Indeed, it’s what allowed me to hold my head high when I went before the Purge Commission. Do you know how many Jewish girls I saved, during the Occupation? A good twenty of them. From 1941 to 1945, I had twenty Jewish girls staying in my establishment. When they sent me to the Purge Commission, those young ladies came and spoke in my favor. In fact, I took in four Jewish girls when they were doing that horrible Vel’ d’Hiv roundup. My establishment might be a bordello, but how many Jews did you employ under the Germans, Monsieur Duprat? What would the Nazis have done to me, pray tell, if their officers had learned that they were sleeping with Jewish girls? I’m not saying I have a noble craft. I don’t put on any airs. But where, other than my place, would these young ladies have been taken in and helped?”

  Duprat — there’s an exception to every rule — was speechless. After a moment of silence, all he could do was mutter, “Goddammit,” and beat his retreat. I recounted the incident to Madame Julie, who seemed fairly disconcerted.

  “I didn’t know Fabienne had saved Jewish girls,” she said.

  She announced to me that nothing would make her happier than helping me continue the work of Ambrose Fleury.

  “At least the money will be going to something clean,” she said.

  Madame Julie also showed a lot of understanding and benevolence toward Lila’s parents. “There’s nothing more unpleasant than the fate of exiled aristocrats,” she explained to us. “I can’t stand the thought of people who are used to a certain lifestyle falling victim to hard times. I’ve always had a horror of the fallen.”

  So she entrusted Genitchka Bronicka with the management of a hôtel particulier in the rue des Marronniers, which, over the years, achieved a global reputation. This allowed Stas to return to his old stomping grounds at the gaming tables and horse tracks. He succumbed to a heart attack in 1957, at the Deauville roulette table, as the croupier pushed the three million chips he had just won over to him. It may therefore be said that he died happy.

  The embassy of the new Polish People’s Republic could give us no information concerning Tad. We never got any. To us, he is still alive, and still fighting in the Resistance.

  We took the train back to Cléry, and finally made it back in the early afternoon, following numerous stops on the still damaged railway. We walked home to La Motte through the fields. The rain had helped the sky with its morning ablutions, and it was a beautiful day.

  The Norman earth was still gashed and bruised, but the peaceful autumn was already at work healing it over. The sky, arching over the toppled tanks and gutted houses, had regained its look of beautiful detachment.

  “Ludo!”

  I had seen him. He was floating in the air, his arms raised in a V for victory. It was the General de Gaulle kite, flying above La Motte. There was a little wind, to help him gain height, and he was pulling hard at his moorings — he must not have appreciated being tied down. He floated majestically, a little heavily, slanting, bathed in crepuscular light.

  Lila had already begun running toward the house. I stayed where I was. I was afraid. I didn’t dare. I had just knocked on every door in Paris: the Ministry of Prisoners and Concentration Camp Inmates, the Red Cross, and the Polish Embassy, where it was confirmed to me that the list of prisoners held at Auschwitz had indeed included the name Ambrose Fleury.

  Hope is a shock. My entire body was ice-cold, and already I was crying with disappointment and despair. It wasn’t him, it was someone else, or the children had wanted to surprise us. Finally, unable to face it, I sat down on the ground and hid my face in my hands.

  “It’s him, Ludo! He’s back!”

  Lila pulled me by the arm. The rest was a kind of happy haze. My uncle Ambrose couldn’t hug me, because he couldn’t let go of his de Gaulle, but he gave me a look in which tenderness and good cheer had finally found their home again.

  “Well, Ludo, what do you say? Pretty great, isn’t he? I haven’t lost my touch. We’ll need hundreds — the whole country will be asking for them.”

  He hadn’t changed. He hadn’t aged. His mustache was as long and thick as ever, and his eye just as solemn in its gaiety. There isn’t a thing they can do about that. I don’t know what I mean by “they.” The Nazis, maybe. Or simply anyone.

  “I’ve been worried about you,” he said. “And you, too, Lila. Kept me up some nights. Can you imagine, twenty months without a word …”

  Christ, I thought. He spent twenty months in Buchenwald and Auschwitz, and he was worr
ied about us.

  “I came back through Russia,” he said. “I worked there for a few months. With all they’ve been through, the kids over there really need kites. I see you’ve been busy, but there’s a lot to be done.”

  We spent the evening making an inventory to see what we still had.

  “We can patch up a few of them,” my uncle said. “But the whole historical series needs to be reassembled. Will you look at that!”

  Pascal and Montaigne, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Diderot, whom we had recovered from the neighbors, were hanging from the ceiling, moth-eaten and covered in spots, ailing and eaten away by the poor climate.

  “Well, we’ll put it all back, that’s all …”

  He thought for a moment.

  “And then again, I wonder if it’s really worth redoing the past. Well, yes, of course, for memory’s sake. But we need some new blood. We’ll do de Gaulle for the time being — that’ll be it for a while. But then we’ll have to find something else, look to the horizon, reach for the future …”

  I wanted to tell him about the Clos Joli and Marcellin Duprat, for something in me suspected that the future was located in that direction, but no man is a prophet in his own land, and we still had a long way to go.

  The return of Ambrose Fleury was celebrated like a national holiday, and for everyone, it was as if France had finally found its true face again. The children helped us secretly assemble an Ambrose Fleury kite, and it floated for an entire Sunday above the square that now bears his name, near the Cléry Kite Museum, which, I regret to observe, is better known abroad than it is in France — and whose reputation far from equals that of the Clos Joli. You won’t find the Ambrose Fleury kite in the museum’s collection, though. My uncle vehemently refused to become a museum piece, despite the fact that, in Marcellin Duprat’s slightly catty words, “he had it coming to him.” Relations between the two men aren’t what they once were. They may be a bit jealous of each other, and at times they appear to be tussling over the future. “We’ll see who has the last word” is a sentence I’ve heard both men grumble from time to time.

  And I end this story by writing — just once more — the names of Pastor André Trocmé and Le Chambon-sur-Lignon. Because there isn’t anything better to say than that.

  Translator’s afterword

  One of the great charms of Romain Gary is that he fully inhabits his language; he uses every square inch of every word, milking each expression for all the cultural references, nuances, and colors it can possibly give. And French is already a language that savors itself — from its coarsest slang to its most flowery Latinate phrases. The reason for this is partly numerical: French has fewer words than English, so each one has to pack more meaning. My favorite example of this is doux, for which English requires no fewer than six different words: it can mean sugary, gentle, soft, smooth, clement, or kindly. Another favorite is Ambrose Fleury’s nickname. In French it is “le facteur timbré,” which I translated as “the certified postman.” This does the job just fine, but the French is even more efficient: “timbré” means both “stamped” and “crazy.”

  Gary doesn’t just use French — he is French. He can pack an entire social commentary into a tiny expression. Take “autres poires Belle-Hélène.” It’s just a tiny, throwaway phrase in a sentence Ludo uses to describe the first social event he attends at Lila’s house, to which all manner of elegant and intimidating people have been invited. Here it is in English:

  And that was how, on that memorable afternoon in the last days of July 1935, we all ended up together for the first time, and in my memory not a single one of the tutti-frutti ices, pastries, or other sweet things will ever melt or turn.

  Other sweet things is — after a great deal of thought and a tiny measure of regret — the translation I chose for autres poires Belle-Hélène. It does the main work of the French, which is to indicate that the narrator may or may not be talking about dessert. But I was obliged to drain away some of what Gary poured into those four words. A poire Belle-Hélène is indeed a sweet, made of poached pears covered with chocolate sauce and served with vanilla ice cream, and by the time Gary wrote The Kites it was a little bit old-fashioned — a classic French dessert. In its time, however, it was a chic invention by the celebrated French chef Auguste Escoffier, a major influence in French cuisine that Marcellin Duprat disdains but cannot ignore. Escoffier named it in honor of the Offenbach operetta “La Belle Hélène,” a farcical retelling of the story of Helen of Troy. And “poire” is also slang for “face.” The expression “faire sa poire” — “to pull a pear” — means “to behave in a haughty or disdainful way.”

  Of course you do not need to know any of this: translation, effectively done, builds a window, with a pane pellucid enough for the reader to enjoy an unobstructed view. But no matter how lovely the view, no translator is ever satisfied with it. This has nothing to do with the text produced, and everything to do with the act of producing it: translation is the most intense form of reading there is; it gives you an intimacy with the text unmatched by any other form of reading, an intimacy you are loath to leave behind. To offer your reader a translation is a bit like showing off a home renovation; that terrace on which you have invited him to have a drink represents a whole world of your time — how can anyone really enjoy it before you’ve shown them the lovely brickwork you uncovered and your clever rewiring of the original light fixtures? But of course not everyone is interested in brickwork and fittings, which is why this translator’s note comes at the back of the book: you also have my blessing to simply sit and enjoy the view.

  Gary dedicated this book to memory, and it is a prodigious work of just that, sparkling with names he did not want forgotten. First, of course, are the subjects of Ambrose Fleury’s kites; some of which are well-known, such as Voltaire and Zola, while others exist only in the faint echoes of France’s collective historical memory. There is Arcole, “of whose name, rightly or wrongly,” Ambrose explains to Ludo, “nothing remains but the bridge.” Here Gary is referring the Pont d’Arcole in Paris, which supposedly bears this name because during the July Revolution of 1830, a young man was shot down there as he planted a tricolor flag, and as he fell, called out, “Remember that my name is Arcole.” There’s also the Good King Dagobert kite, who, Ambrose assures Cléry’s mayor, “isn’t subversive.” Strictly speaking, this is true, but Le bon roi Dagobert is a popular French children’s song that, while ostensibly about the Merovingian King Dagobert and his chief counselor Saint Éloi, was sung since its invention in the eighteenth century to poke fun at various French monarchs, including Louis XV and Napoleon III.

  Next are the men of the Third Republic: there are the extreme ones, such as Ravachol, a young and handsome anarchist arrested and sentenced to life in prison for bombing an elegant Parisian restaurant (Ludo has a thought for him when he’s at that fancy tea I just mentioned). There are the idealist politicians, such as Léon Blum, Jean Jaurès, and Édouard Herriot, who fought for human rights, democratic values, and peace. Herriot, for whom Marcellin Duprat named one of the dining rooms of the Clos Joli, may be the ultimate embodiment of Gary’s idea of madness as resistance: during the Occupation, he was placed under house arrest for his opposition to Pétain’s Vichy government, whereupon he feigned psychological instability and was committed to a mental institution by the Nazis. Finally, there are the turncoats and the collaborators, chief among them Pierre Laval, who began as a socialist labor lawyer and ended up as one of the most important politicians of the Vichy Regime and nominal head of the Milice Française, a paramilitary organization dedicated to fighting Resistance forces.

  Laval is not the only person Gary names who has a conflicted (not to say highly compromised) moral life — Genitchka Bronicka’s two lovers, Basil Zaharoff and Calouste Gulbenkian, each left behind mixed legacies of corruption and generosity: both were major philanthropists; at the same time, Zarahoff was an arms dealer and Gulbenkian served as a F
rench diplomat under the Vichy Regime. There is also Sven Hedin, a Swedish topographer and explorer who made multiple expeditions to Central Asia. He was both a supporter and a critic of Nazism, maintained correspondence with both Hitler and Goebbels, and made efforts on behalf of deported Jews and Norwegian political dissidents.

  But let us return, as Marcellin Duprat put it, to those who “stood firm,” not least among them his own peers: while Duprat is fictional, Pic, Point, Dumaine, and all the other chefs named in the book were real — not only that, all of their restaurants were still in existence the year this translation was completed. Gary names a number of famous members of the French Resistance. Henri Honoré d’Estienne d’Orves offers a portrait of a man who shared Gary’s conviction that the enemy was a difficult creature to define. One of first commanding officers in the French Navy to rally to Charles de Gaulle, d’Estienne d’Orves was arrested and condemned to death by a Nazi military tribunal, and his good cheer and kindness while in prison are legendary. He demanded that his execution by firing squad take place with no blindfold and no handcuffs, and his last words to the president of the tribunal that had sentenced him to death were, “Sir, you are a German officer. I am a French officer. Both of us have done our duty. Allow me to embrace you.”

  Perhaps most important to Romain Gary — and most difficult to discern in the text — are the names of his comrades in RAF Squadron 324, known as the Lorraine Squadron, with which Gary flew during World War II. Lieutenant Lucchesi, the aviator Marcellin Duprat agrees to shelter, was Yves Lucchesi, one of the few members of the Lorraine Squadron, along with Gary, to survive the war — only to die in as a passenger in a plane crash in 1947. And — again at that society tea, just before the war breaks out — Ludo tells us, “Only one man among them showed a friendly interest in me. It was a famous aviator, Corniglion-Molinier, who had just failed in a highly courageous manner in his attempt to fly from Paris to Australia, in the company of the English Mollison. The Gazette had gratified the failure with the following attempt at commentary: ‘Mollison and Molinier will never make a hit!’” Édouard Corniglion-Molinier was a dear friend of Gary’s. In 1936, he and Jim Mollison flew from London to Cape Town, South Africa together, in a failed attempt to break a record set by Mollison’s wife, Amy Johnson (who herself had broken a record set by Mollison). Both Johnson and Mollison were pilots for the English Air Transport Auxiliary during World War II; Corniglion-Molinier flew with Gary in the Lorraine Squadron. So the fictitious headline is a joke in their honor — both of them went on to make plenty of hits during the war. I do not know, but I did wonder as I worked whether Gary chose the names of these two men because they, as he did, came through the war alive, and were left, as Gary was, to struggle with that miracle.