reading

1

Nowadays, The little museum in Cléry devoted to the works of Ambrose Fleury is only a minor tourist attraction. Most of its visitors drift over after lunch at the Clos Joli, a restaurant that guidebooks unanimously praise as one of France’s most celebrated landmarks. These same guidebooks note the little museum’s existence with the words, “worth a side trip.” The museum’s five rooms hold most of my uncle’s work—the pieces that survived the war, the Occupation, the Liberation fighting, and all the vicissitudes and lassitudes our people has known.

Whatever their country of origin, all kites are born in the popular imagination, which is what gives them their slightly naive look; Ambrose Fleury’s kites were no exception, even the final pieces he made in his old age bear that stamp of innocence and that freshness of soul. Despite lagging interest and the slim funding it receives from the municipal government, it’s unlikely the museum will close its doors anytime soon—it’s too much a part of our history. Mostly, though, its rooms are deserted. These days, the French are mostly looking to forget, not to remember.

The best existing photograph of Ambrose Fleury can be found at the museum’s entrance. It shows him in his rural postman’s outfit: his uniform and peaked cap, his big clodhoppers, his leather bag slung over his belly, standing between two of his kites, one in the shape of a ladybug, and one representing the fiery statesman Léon Gambetta, whose face and body form the balloon and the basket with which he made his famous flight during the siege of Paris. There are lots of pictures of the “certified postman,” as he was long known in Cléry—most visitors to his workshop snapped a photo or two, just for a laugh. My uncle posed willingly for these portraits. He was unafraid of ridicule, and didn’t mind being nicknamed the “certified postman” or labeled a “harmless eccentric.” If he was aware that the locals had dubbed him “crazy old Fleury,” then he seemed to see it more as a sign of their admiration than of their scorn. In the nineteen thirties, when my uncle’s reputation began to grow, Marcellin Duprat, the chef and owner of the Clos Joli restaurant, came up with the idea of printing postcards that showed my guardian posed in uniform among his kites, with the words, Cléry: Celebrated rural postman Ambrose Fleury and his kites. Unfortunately, the cards were done in black and white, and so they betray no hint of the kites’ joyful colors and forms, none of their smiling bonhomie—none of what I’d call the knowing winks the old Norman was always aiming skyward.

My father was killed in the First World War, and my mother died shortly thereafter. The Great War also took the life of Robert, the second of the three Fleury brothers; my uncle Ambrose came back from it after taking a bullet through the chest. For the sake of clarity in this story, I should also add that my great-grandfather Antoine perished on the barricades during the Paris Commune. I do believe that this little feature of our past played a decisive role in my guardian’s life, though nothing left a deeper mark on him than the names of his two brothers carved onto Cléry’s war monument. The man he was before the Great War—people say he was quick to go the knuckle back then—had come home someone very different. Many found it surprising that a decorated combatant like my uncle would take every opportunity to express his pacifist sentiments, defend conscientious objectors, and condemn violence in all its forms, with a glint in his eye that was probably just a reflection of the flame burning at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Physically, there was nothing soft or gentle about him. His sculpted features and cropped gray hair gave him a hard and ready look, with one of those big bushy mustaches that are usually qualified as “Gallic”—thank God the French have managed to hang on to at least some of their historical memory, if only by the hairs. His gaze was somber, which is always a good foil for merriment. It was generally believed that he’d come back from the war a little bit “touched,” which explained the pacifism, as well as his funny passion for his kites: he spent every spare minute with his gnamas, as he called them. He had discovered this word in a book about Equatorial Africa, where apparently it refers to everything that has a breath of life in it: men and mosquitoes, lions and ideas and elephants. Most likely he chose to become a rural postman because his Military Medal and his two War Cross citations gave him special priority for restricted civil service jobs. Then again, maybe he felt this was a good line of work for a pacifist. Often, he would say to me, “If you’re lucky, my little Ludo, and you work hard, then someday maybe you can get a nice office job with the postal administration, too.”

It took me many years to find my way through which things were matters of great consequence and faith to him, and which ones he drew from a wellspring of irony that seemed to flow from some pooled source where the French go to find themselves when they are lost.

My uncle always said: “Kites need to learn to fly, just like everybody else,” and from the time I was seven, as soon as school let out, I would accompany him to what he called “practice.” Sometimes we’d go to the field beside La Motte, and sometimes farther, to the banks of the Rigole, with a gnama that still smelled deliciously of fresh glue.

“You have to hang on tight to them,” he would explain, “because they pull, and sometimes they break loose and fly too high—they take off in pursuit of the blue yonder and you never see them again, except when people bring them back here in pieces.”

“But if I hang on too tight, won’t I fly away with them, too?”

My uncle would smile, which made his big mustache look even kinder.

“It could happen,” he’d say. “You can’t let yourself get carried away.”

My uncle gave all his kites pet names: Cracklemunch, Gambol, Hobbledehoy, Fatsy, Zigomar, Flutterpat, Lovey. I never understood why he picked the names he did. Why the name Bumble belonged to a kind of silly frog whose front legs waved “hello” to you in the wind, and not to Swash, who was a fish wreathed in smiles that wiggled its silvery scales and pink fins in the air. Or why he chose to fly his Patooty above the field by La Motte and not his Martian kite, Meemy, who I thought was a lovely creature, with round eyes and wings shaped like ears that quivered as the kite began to rise. I practiced until I could imitate him with great skill, and bested everyone in schoolyard competitions. When my uncle launched a gnama with a shape I didn’t understand, he would explain, “You’ve got to try and make them be different from everything else in the world. Something really new—something that’s never been seen or known before. Those are the leads you have to hold on to the hardest, though. They really go after the blue yonder if you let them go, and can do a lot of damage when they fall back down.”

Sometimes it seemed to me that it was the kite holding Ambrose Fleury at the end of the line, and not the other way round.

For a long time, my favorite was the brave Fatsy, whose belly would puff up in the most wonderfully surprising way as soon as he got up in the air. With only a little breeze, he would execute comical flips by flapping his paunch with his paws, depending on how my uncle pulled or let out the line.

I allowed Fatsy to sleep with me, because on the ground, kites require a great deal of friendship. The shape goes out of them when they come down, and living flat on their faces like that makes them highly susceptible to the blues. For its beauty to really shine, a kite needs height, fresh air, and wide-open skies.

As a rural postman, my guardian spent his workdays crisscrossing the countryside, picking up the mail at the post office each morning and delivering it to the people in our community. But he was nearly always back home by the time I’d finished the walk from school, a good three miles away, standing in his postman’s uniform in the field by La Motte—the wind at our place was always better in the late afternoon—gazing up at one of his “little friends” bobbing and fluttering high above us. And yet, when we lost our superb Fourseas—all its twelve sails filled up in one big burst and ripped kite and reel right out of my hands—I burst out sobbing and my uncle said to me, his eyes following his work of art as it disappeared into the blue yonder: “Don’t cry. That’s what they’re meant to do. He’s happy up there.”

I was ten years old when the Honfleur Gazette published a slightly mocking article about “Ambrose Fleury, our fellow citizen, the country postman from Cléry: a charmingly original character whose kites will no doubt make a celebrated name of our region, like lace did for Valenciennes, porcelain for Limoges, and mints for Cambrai.” My uncle cut out the page, framed it, and hung it on a nail in the workshop.

“You see I’ve got my share of vanity,” he remarked to me, with a little wink.

A Paris newspaper picked up the Honfleur Gazette article and its accompanying photograph, and our barn, thenceforth known as “the workshop,” soon began receiving not only visitors, but also orders. Marcellin Duprat, an old friend of my uncle’s, began recommending this “local curiosity” to his customers at the Clos Joli.

One day, an automobile pulled up at our farm and a very elegant-looking gentleman emerged from inside it. What impressed me most about this man was his mustache, which went all the way up to his ears and disappeared into his sideburns, dividing his face in two. Later, I learned that he was the great English collector Lord Howe; he came accompanied by a valet and a trunk, which was opened to reveal a magnificent collection of kites from all over the world—Burma, Japan, China, Siam—carefully arranged against a custom-made velvet backing. My uncle was invited to admire them, which he did with the utmost sincerity: there wasn’t a shred of prejudice in him. The one tiny point of national pride he clung to was his insistence that the kite had only acquired its true nobility with the French Revolution. After he had paid his respects to the English collector’s showpieces, he brought out some of his own creations, including a Victor Hugo kite inspired by the famous Nadar photo: when flown, the poet seemed to be borne aloft by clouds, giving him a slight resemblance to God the Father. After an hour or two of inspection and mutual admiration, the two men went out into the field. Courteously, each one chose the other’s kite, and then they entertained the Norman skies until every child in the area had run up to join the fun.

Ambrose Fleury’s fame continued to grow, but it didn’t swell his head at all, not even when his Young Lady in a Phrygian Bonnet—he was fiercely and viscerally devoted to the French Republic—won first prize at the Nogent competition, nor when Lord Howe invited him to London, where he demonstrated a few of his masterpieces at a gathering in Hyde Park. Europe’s political climate was clouding over then; Hitler was consolidating power and occupying the Rhineland, and this was one of many demonstrations of Franco-British friendship taking place at the time. I saved a photo from the Illustrated London News that shows Ambrose Fleury holding his Liberty Illuminating the World as he stands between Lord Howe and the Prince of Wales. After this semiofficial vesting, Ambrose Fleury was elected to the Order of the Kites of France, first as a member and then as its honorary president. We saw more and more curiosity seekers. Lovely ladies and handsome gentlemen would motor in from Paris to lunch at the Clos Joli and then show up at our place to ask if the “master” might show them one or two of his pieces. The lovely ladies would sit in the grass, the handsome gentlemen would clench cigars between their teeth, hiding their smiles as they watched the “certified postman” hold his Montaigne or his World Peace at the end of a string, gazing up at the blue sky with the fixed stare of a great explorer. It occurred to me that there was something insulting in the titters of the lovely ladies and the superior expressions of the handsome gentlemen. Occasionally, I would overhear their comments, some of them unpleasant, some of them full of pity.

“Apparently he’s not quite all there. Shell shock from the War, you know.”

“He claims he’s a pacifist and a conscientious objector but I daresay he’s quite the clever self-promoter.”

“Hilarious!”

“Marcellin Duprat was right, it’s well worth the trip!”

“Don’t you think he looks like Field Marshal Lyautey, with that crew cut and mustache?”

“Bit of a crazy gleam in his eyes, don’t you think?”

“But of course darling, it’s the creative spark, don’t you know?”

Then they’d buy a kite, just like you’d pay for your seat at a show, and toss it carelessly into the trunk of their car. All the more upsetting was my uncle, who, when absorbed in his passion, became completely oblivious to what was going on around him. He didn’t even notice that some of our visitors were poking fun at him behind his back. One day on the walk home, fuming about some comments I’d overheard while my guardian was flying his favorite kite of all time, a Jean-Jacques Rousseau with wings shaped like open books whose pages fluttered in the wind, I couldn’t hold back my indignation any longer. I marched with giant steps along behind him, my eyebrows furrowed, my fists thrust into my pockets, stomping so hard that my socks fell down around my heels.

“Uncle, those Parisians were making fun of you. They said you were an old nutcase.”

Ambrose Fleury stopped in his tracks. Far from being angry, he seemed rather satisfied.

“Really? They said that?”

I drew myself up to my full four and a half feet and repeated what I’d heard Marcellin Duprat say about a couple of Clos Joli customers who’d complained about the bill: “They are lesser people.”

“There are no lesser people,” my uncle replied.

He leaned over, laid Jean-Jacques Rousseau carefully on the grass, and sat down. I sat down beside him.

“So they said I was crazy. Well, you know what? Those handsome gentlemen and those lovely ladies are right. Obviously, a man who’s dedicated his entire life to kites is a bit touched. But really, that’s a matter of interpretation. Some say it’s touched in the head, some say it’s touched by a sacred spark. It can be hard to tell the difference. But if you really love somebody or something, give them everything you have—everything you are, even. And don’t worry about the rest.” A flash of merriment appeared briefly in his big mustache. “That’s what you need to know, Ludo, if you want to become a good employee of the postal administration.”

2

Our farm had been in the family since one of the Fleurys had built it, shortly after what my grandparents’ generation still called “the events.” When I became curious enough to ask which “events” they were referring to, my uncle explained that it was the French Revolution. In this way I learned that all the Fleurys have long memories.

“Oh yes, maybe it’s the result of mandatory public education, but we Fleurys have always had surprising historical memories. I don’t think a single one of us has ever forgotten anything we learned. Sometimes my grandfather would make us recite the Declaration of the Rights of Man, and it got to be such a habit with me that I still find myself doing it.”

Though my own memory hadn’t yet taken on its “historical” bent, I knew at the time—I’d just turned ten—that it was already a source of surprise, and ultimately of concern, for Monsieur Herbier, my teacher, who sang bass in the Cléry choir in his spare time. He ascribed the ease with which I recalled everything I learned—after reading them over once or twice I could recite pages at a time from my textbooks—as well as my unusual aptitude for mental math, to some kind of malformation of the brain, rather than to the skills, albeit the exceptional ones, of a good student. He was all the more inclined to distrust what he referred to not as my gifts, but my “predispositions”—the rather sinister accent with which he said the word made me feel almost guilty—because my uncle was touched in the head, which everyone took for granted in him, and which made it appear that I had been stricken by some hereditary defect, which might turn out to be fatal. The words I heard most frequently from Monsieur Herbier’s mouth were, “Moderation in all things.” He would stare at me grimly as he pronounced this dire warning. When my predispositions became so glaring that a schoolmate ratted on me for pocketing an ample sum after successfully betting that I could recite ten full pages of the Chaix railway timetable, I learned that Monsieur Herbier had referred to me as a “little freak.” I made matters worse for myself by trotting out square roots from memory and executing rapid-fire multiplications of very long numbers. So Monsieur Herbier came to La Motte and spoke for a long time with my guardian. His advice was that I be sent to Paris and examined by a specialist. My ear pressed up against the door, I took in every word of their exchange.

“Ambrose, this is not a normal proficiency we’re talking about here. It’s happened before, children with amazing gifts for mental calculation turning out abnormal. They end up as circus freaks and that’s the end of it. One part of their brain develops at lightning speed, but they’re gibbering idiots when it comes to everything else. In his current state, Ludovic could practically sit for the entrance examinations at the Polytechnic Institute.”

“That is very curious,” observed my uncle. “With us Fleurys it’s always been historical memory. One of us even ended up in front of a firing squad, under the Commune.”

“I don’t see the connection.”

“Just another one who remembered.”

“Remembered what?”

My uncle observed a moment of silence.

“Everything, probably,” he replied, finally.

“You’re not saying that your ancestor was executed for an excess of memory?”

“That’s exactly what I’m saying. He must have known it all by heart, every single thing the French had been subjected to over the ages.”

“Ambrose, you have a reputation in these parts … I’m sorry to say this, but as a … well, as a bit of a fanatic, but I didn’t come here to talk about your kites.”

“Well, yeah, what about it? So I’m a nutter, too.”

“My visit today is simply to warn you that little Ludovic has an abnormal memory for his age—abnormal for any age, really. He recited the Chaix timetable from memory. Ten pages. He multiplied a fourteen-digit number by another one just as long.”

“Well, so with him it’s numbers. I guess he’s not troubled with the historical memory. Maybe that’ll keep him away from the firing squad, next time.”

“Next time? What next time?”

“How am I supposed to know that? But there always is a next one.”

“You should have him examined by a doctor.”

“Listen, Herbier. You’re pushing it, now. If my nephew were truly abnormal, he’d be an imbecile. Good day, and thank you for your visit. I understand you’re saying this with the best of intentions. Tell me, is he as gifted at history as he is at mathematics?”

“I’m telling you, Ambrose, you can’t call it a gift—or even intelligence. Intelligence implies reason. I’ll repeat that: reasoning. And in that department he’s no better or worse than any other kid his age. As for French history, he can recite every bit of it, from A to Z.”

There was an even longer silence, and then suddenly I heard my uncle bawl, “To Z? What Z? Because there’s already a Z in sight?”

Monsieur Herbier had nothing to say to that. After the defeat in 1940, with the Z hovering distinctly on the horizon, I often found myself thinking back to that conversation.

The only teacher who did not seem the least bit worried about my “predispositions” was my French teacher, Monsieur Pinder. The one time he got upset with me was when, in an attempt to outdo myself, I took it upon myself to start with the last verse of the José-Maria de Heredia poem “Los Conquistadores” and recite it backward. Monsieur Pinder interrupted me with a menacing shake of his finger. “Young Ludovic,” he warned, “I don’t know if this is your way of preparing for what appears to be threatening us all, by which I mean a backward life in a backward world, but I shall ask you to leave poetry out of it, at the very least.”

Later on, it was this same Monsieur Pinder who assigned us a composition topic that would play a certain role in my life later on: “Examine and compare these two expressions: to live reasonably and to keep your reason to live. Do you see a contradiction between the two ideas? Explain.”

It should be acknowledged that Monsieur Herbier was not entirely incorrect when he came to my uncle with his concerns, with his fears that my knack for remembering anything and everything wasn’t accompanied by any growth in maturity, moderation, or plain good sense. Maybe that’s how it is, more or less, for everyone who suffers from an excess of memory—how it turned out for so many Frenchmen a few years later when they were deported, or taken down by the firing squad.

3

Our farm was located behind the hamlet of Clos, at the edge of the Voigny woods. Fern and broom crowded together with beech and oak trees there, and deer and boar roamed wild. Farther on there were marshes, where the peace of teal, otters, dragonflies, and swans reigned.

La Motte was fairly isolated. Our closest neighbors, the Cailleux family, were a good half-hour’s walk away. Little Johnny Cailleux was two years younger than I, so to him, I was “the big boy.” His parents had a dairy in town; the grandfather, Gaston, who had lost a leg in a sawmill accident, kept bees. Further on, there was the Magnard family, a taciturn lot who didn’t care for anything besides cows, butter, and fields. The father, the son, and the daughters, two old maids, never spoke to anyone.

“Except to tell or ask a price,” Gaston Cailleux would grumble.

Other than that, the only farms between La Motte and Cléry belonged to the Monniers and the Simons, whose children were in my class at school.

I knew the surrounding woods all the way down to their smallest, most secret corners. My uncle had helped me build an Indian wigwam, a little hut made of branches and covered in oilcloth, at the bottom of a ravine in a place known as Vieille-Source. I’d slip over there to read the books of James Oliver Curwood and James Fenimore Cooper, and dream of the Apaches and the Sioux, or else, besieged by enemy forces—which, as tradition requires, were always “superior in number”—I would defend myself down to the last bullet cartridge. I was dozing there one day in mid-June, having gorged on wild strawberries, when I opened my eyes to see a very blonde little girl gazing severely at me from beneath a big straw hat. Sun and shadow were dappled beneath the branches, and even today, after so many years, it seems that dark and light have never ceased to play around Lila—that somehow, in this instant of emotion, whose reason and nature I didn’t comprehend, I was forewarned. Instinctively, driven by some unknown inner force or weakness, I made a gesture whose definitive, irrevocable nature I was far from understanding at the time: I held out a handful of strawberries to the severe blonde apparition. I had no idea how much more than that I was offering. The little girl came and sat down beside me, and without paying the least attention to the berries I proffered, took the entire basket. And that was how the roles were dealt, for all time. When there were only a few strawberries left at the bottom of the basket, she handed it back to me and said, with a certain degree of reproach, “They’re better with sugar.”

There was only one thing to do, and I didn’t hesitate. I leapt up and took off running, fists at my side, through the woods and fields to La Motte, where I shot into the kitchen like a cannonball, grabbed a box of powdered sugar from the shelf, and retraced my steps at the same speed. There she was, sitting in the grass, her hat lying beside her, contemplating a ladybug on the back of her hand. I held the sugar out to her.

“I don’t want any more. But that’s nice.”

“We’ll leave the sugar here and come back tomorrow,” I said, with inspiration bred from despair.

“Maybe. What’s your name?”

“Ludo. What’s yours?”

The ladybug flew off.

“We don’t know each other well enough yet. Maybe someday I’ll tell you my name. I’m pretty mysterious, you know. You’ll probably never see me again. What do your parents do?”

“I don’t have any parents. I live with my uncle.”

“What does he do?”

I sensed vaguely that “rural postman” wasn’t quite the right thing.

“He’s a kite master.”

She seemed favorably impressed.

“What does that mean?”

“It’s like a great captain, but in the sky.”

She thought for a little while longer, then got up. “Maybe I’ll come back tomorrow,” she said. “I don’t know. I’m very unpredictable. How old are you?”

“I’m almost ten.”

“Oh, you’re far too young for me. I’m eleven and a half. But I like wild strawberries. Wait for me here tomorrow at the same time. I’ll be back if there’s nothing better to do.”

She left me, after shooting me one last severe look.

I must have picked six pounds of strawberries the next day. Every few minutes, I ran to see if she was there. She didn’t return that day. Nor the next day, nor the day after that.

I waited for her every day in June, July, August, and September. At first I had the strawberries to count on, then blueberries, then blackberries, then mushrooms. The only other time waiting would cause me such torment was from 1940 to 1944, keeping watch for France’s return. Even when it came time for the mushrooms to abandon me, too, I kept returning to the forest, to the place we had met. The year passed, and then another and another again, and I discovered that Monsieur Herbier had not been entirely wrong when he warned my uncle that there was something unsettling about my memory. There must have been some kind of hereditary weakness in the Fleury family: we did not possess the soothing ability to forget. I studied, I helped my guardian in the workshop, but rare were the times when a little girl in a white dress did not dog me, clutching a big straw hat in her hand. It was indeed an “excess of memory,” as Monsieur Herbier had so rightly pointed out—something that must not have plagued him too much, given how carefully he avoided memory’s dangerous, ardent clamor under the Nazis. Three or four years after our encounter, when the first strawberries appeared, I still found myself filling my basket and stretching out under the beeches with my eyes closed, to encourage her to surprise me. I even remembered the sugar. Of course, as time went by, there was a certain amount of fun in it. I had begun to understand what my uncle called “the pursuit of the blue yonder,” and I was learning not to take myself, or my excess of memory, too seriously.

4

I sat for my baccalauréat exams at fourteen, thanks to a “special dispensation” obtained with the help of Monsieur Julliac, the secretary at our town hall, who “adjusted” my birth certificate to make me fifteen. I didn’t yet know what I was going to do with my life. In the meantime, my gift for numbers had led Marcellin Duprat to entrust me with the accounts of the Clos Joli. I worked there twice a week. I read everything I could get my hands on, from medieval fabliaux to works like Henri Barbusse’s Under Fire and Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, both gifts from my uncle—although, with his confidence in “mandatory public education,” he rarely recommended books to me. Beyond that confidence, I believe Ambrose Fleury had a trust even greater in something he seemed to consider a certainty, despite the debate it has provoked before, during, and after: the heredity of acquired traits—above all, he’d add, among “our kind.”

Several years had passed since my uncle had left his job as a rural postman, but Marcellin Duprat, with no little zeal, advised him to receive visitors in his old uniform. The owner of the Clos Joli had a keen sense of what nowadays we’d call “public relations.”

“You understand, Ambrose? You’re a legend now. You’ve got to uphold that legend. I know you could care less about it for yourself, but you owe it to your country. My customers are always asking about you: ‘That Fleury, the famous postman with his kites—is he still around? Can we go see him?’ Your whatsits, whatever you call them—I mean, you do sell them, after all. They’re your livelihood. Well, so you have to keep up your name. Someday people will be saying ‘the Postman Fleury’ like they say ‘le Douanier Rousseau.’ Look at me, when I come out to greet customers, I keep my chef’s hat and jacket on. Because that’s how they want to see me.”

Although Marcellin was an old friend, his little recipe didn’t please my uncle one bit. They had a few first-rate shouting matches over it. The owner of the Clos Joli saw himself as something of a national treasure, and the only people in his field he would acknowledge as equals were Point in Vienne, Pic in Valence, and Dumaine in Saulieu. He had a stately presence: a faintly receding hairline, clear, steel-blue eyes, and a little mustache that gave him a haughty, authoritarian air. There was something military in his bearing, perhaps acquired during his years in the trenches of the Great War. In the thirties, it had not yet occurred to France to retreat into its culinary grandeur, and Marcellin Duprat deemed himself its unsung hero.

“The only man who understands me is Édouard Herriot. The other day, as he was leaving, he said to me, ‘Every time I come here is a comfort. I can’t say what the future holds for us, but I’m sure the Clos Joli will survive it all. The only thing is, Marcellin, you’re going to have to wait awhile for your Legion of Honor Medal. The abundance of cultural riches we still enjoy in France makes us neglect some of our more modest values.’ That’s what Herriot said to me. So do me a favor, Ambrose. You and I are the only famous people around here. Please, every so often, for the sake of the customers, if you’d just put on your postman’s uniform—I promise, you’ll look a hell of a lot better than in those hick corduroys.”

In the end, my uncle couldn’t help but laugh. I was always happy when I saw those nice little wrinkles—the kind that live off merriment—appear on his face.

“Good old Marcellin! All that grandeur can weigh heavy on a man’s shoulders. But you know what? He’s not all wrong. Popularizing the peaceful art of kite-making is worth sacrificing a little pride for.”

I don’t think it actually bothered my uncle all that much to button up his old postman’s uniform when he went out into the fields surrounded by children, two or three of whom came regularly to La Motte for “practice” after school.

As I mentioned, Ambrose Fleury had been elected honorary president of the Order of the Kites of France, and God knows why he resigned from it after Munich. I never did understand how it was that an ardent pacifist could feel so indignant, so beaten, the day that peace—shameful as some people said it was—was kept at Munich. No doubt it was the old Fleury historical memory flaring up again.

My own memory wasn’t letting up any, either. Every summer, I returned to the forest and remembered. I asked around and learned that I had not been the victim of some kind of “apparition,” as I had occasionally begun to fear was the case. Elisabeth de Bronicka really did exist; her parents owned Le Manoir des Jars, an estate bordered by the road from Clos to Cléry, whose walls I passed every day on the way to school. They hadn’t been back to Normandy for several summers. From my uncle, I learned that they had their mail forwarded to Poland, to their estate on the shores of the Baltic, not far from the Free City of Gdańsk, better known back then as Danzig. No one knew if they were ever coming back.

“This isn’t the first kite you’ve lost in your life, Ludo,” my uncle would remind me when he saw me returning from the woods with my basket of strawberries still disconsolately full. “And it won’t be the last, either.”

By that point, I hoped for nothing more. Even though my game had become a bit childish for a boy of fourteen, I had before me the example of a grown man who’d succeeded in preserving in himself the scrap of naïveté that turns into wisdom only when it ages badly.

It had been nearly four years since I’d seen “my Polish girl,” as I called her, but my memory had held up perfectly. The finely sculpted features of her face made you want to cup it in the palm of your hand, and the harmonious vivacity of her every movement got me excellent marks on my philosophy finals. I had chosen aesthetics as the subject of my exams, and the examiner, who I imagine was worn out after a long day’s work, said: “I shall ask you only one question: What characterizes grace?”

I thought of the Polish girl—her neck, her arms, her floating hair—and did not hesitate: “Motion.”

He gave me nineteen points out of twenty. I owe my baccalauréat to love.

Aside from Johnny Cailleux, who would occasionally come sit in a corner and watch me, a little sadly—“at least you have somebody,” he said to me one day with envy—I had no real ties to anyone. I had become almost as indifferent to my surroundings as the Magnard family. I would run into them from time to time, the father, the son, and the two daughters, clutching their crates as they lurched down the path in their cart on the way to market. I said hello every time, and they never answered.

Early July 1936 found me sitting in the grass with my basket of strawberries, reading José-Maria de Heredia, whose poems still seem to me to have been quite unjustly forgotten. In front of me, in a tunnel of light between two beeches, sunshine rolled over the ground like a voluptuous cat. From time to time, a titmouse fled from the nearby marsh.

I lifted my eyes. There she was before me, a girl whom the past four years had treated with a piety that was like a tribute to my memory. My heart leapt from my chest and clutched at my throat. I froze.

And then the emotion passed.

Calmly, I laid down my book.

She had been a little late in returning, that was all.

“I hear you’ve been waiting for four years to see me …” She laughed. “You didn’t even forget the sugar!”

“I never forget anything.”

“I forget everything so easily. I don’t even recall your name.”

I let her play with me. If she knew I had been looking for her everywhere, then she had to know who I was.

“Wait … Let me think … Oh yes. It’s Ludovic. Ludo. The son of Ambrose Fleury, the famous postman.”

“His nephew.” I held out the basket of strawberries. She tasted one, sat down beside me, and picked up my book.

“My God. José-Maria de Heredia! That’s so unfashionable. You should read Rimbaud and Apollinaire.”

There was only one thing to do. I recited:

She he once called his Angevin sweet

O’er trembling chords erred spirit fleet

As love’s anguish struck her heart; in pain

Her voice cried to the winds that lured him away

To caress him; perchance his fickle heart swayed

With his song, made for a thresher of grain.

She appeared flattered, and pleased with herself.

“Our gardeners told me that you came and asked questions about whether I was ever coming back. Crazy in love, or something.”

I saw that I’d be lost if I didn’t stand up for myself. “You know, sometimes the best way to forget about someone is to see them again.”

“Hang on a second, don’t get all worked up, I was only teasing. Is it true, what they say—that you’re all like that?”

“Like what?”

“That you don’t forget?”

“My uncle Ambrose claims the Fleurys have such good memories that some of them even died from it.”

“How can you die from memory? That’s ridiculous.”

“That’s what he thinks, too—it’s why he hates war and became a rural postman. He’s only interested in kites, now. They’re beautiful when they’re in the sky, but at least you can stick a string to them, and even when they get away from you and crash, it’s just paper and bits of wood.”

“I’d like you to explain to me how you can die of memory.”

“It’s pretty complicated.”

“I’m not an idiot. I might be able to understand.”

“All I mean is that it’s kind of difficult to explain. Apparently all the Fleurys are victims of mandatory public education.”

“Of what?!”

“Of mandatory public education. They were taught too many beautiful things and they remembered them too well, and believed in them completely, and passed them down from father to son, because of the heredity of acquired traits, and …” I sensed that I was not explaining myself as well as I should have; I wanted to add that there was in all of this a battiness that some would call a sacred spark, but, riveted, by the severe blue gaze that she had turned on me full force, I only dug myself further in. I kept repeating obstinately, “They were taught too many beautiful things that they believed in—they even got killed for them. That’s why my uncle became a pacifist and a conscientious objector.”

She shook her head with a humph. “I can’t understand a word you say. It doesn’t hold together, what your uncle says.”

Suddenly, what seemed like a clever idea struck me: “Well, come see us at La Motte, and he’ll explain it to you himself.”

“I have no intention of wasting my time listening to old wives’ tales. I read Rilke and Thomas Mann—not José-Maria de Heredia. Besides, you live with him, and he doesn’t seem to have been able to explain it to you.”

“You have to be French to understand.”

She grew angry. “Oh, nonsense. Because the French have better memories than the Polish?”

I had begun to feel crazed. This was not the conversation I was expecting after a tragic, four-year separation. At the same time, making a fool of myself was out of the question, even if I hadn’t read Rilke and Thomas Mann.

“It’s a question of historical memory,” I insisted. “There are lots of things that French people remember and can’t make themselves forget, and it lasts your whole life, except with people whose memories go blank. I already explained, it’s an effect of mandatory public education. I don’t see what’s so hard to understand about that.”

She stood up and looked at me pityingly. “You think that you French are the only ones with this ‘historical memory’? That we Poles don’t have one, too? I never saw such a silly ass as you. One hundred and sixty Bronickis have been killed in the past five centuries alone, most of them in heroic circumstances, and we have the documents to prove it. Goodbye. You will never see me again. Well, no. You’ll see me again. I feel sorry for you. You’ve been coming here to wait for me for the past four years, and instead of just admitting that you’re madly in love with me—like all the rest of them—you insult my country. What do you know about Poland anyway? Go ahead. I’m listening.”

She crossed her arms over her chest and waited.

Tears pricked my eyes: everything was so different from what I had hoped for and imagined when I dreamed of her. This was all my crazy old uncle’s fault. He had filled my head with stacks of ridiculous notions, instead of keeping them for his paper darlings. I was making such an effort to hold back tears that suddenly she became worried.

“What’s wrong with you? You’ve turned green.”

“I love you,” I whispered.

“That’s no reason to turn green. At least, not yet. You’ll have to get to know me better. Goodbye. I’ll see you soon. But don’t ever try to give us Polish people lessons about historical memory. Promise?”

“I swear to you, I wasn’t trying to … I think very highly of Poland. It’s a country known for …”

“For what?”

I was silent. I realized with horror that the only thing I could come up with that had anything to do with Poland was the expression “drunk as a Pole.”

She laughed. “Well, all right. Four years isn’t bad. You could do better, obviously, but you’d need more time.”

And having stated the obvious, she left me—a white, lively silhouette drifting off through the beech trees, into the light and shadow.

I dragged myself back to La Motte and lay down with my face to the wall. I felt like I had ruined my life. I couldn’t understand why or how, instead of proclaiming my love to her, I had let myself get into some senseless conversation about France, Poland, and their respective historical memories, which I didn’t give one good goddamn about. Clearly, this was all my uncle’s fault, with his rainbow-winged pacifist Jean Jaurès and his Arcole—of whose name, rightly or wrongly, as he’d once explained to me, nothing remained but the bridge.

That evening, he came to see me. “What’s gotten into you?”

“She came back.”

He smiled affectionately. “And I’ll wager she’s not at all the same. It’s always a safer bet to make them yourself,” he added, “with pretty-colored paper and string.”

Romain Gary

THE KITES

Translated from the French by Miranda Richmond Mouillot

PENGUIN CLASSICS

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