“The second coming,” Tad muttered. “That’s all we needed.”
Some days, I barely saw Lila at all. She would disappear into the forest with her pencils and a fat notebook. I knew that she was writing a diary that was to eclipse the then-celebrated journal of the painter and sculptor Marie Bashkirtseff. Tad had given her Mary Stanfield’s History of Feminist Struggles, but the word “feminist” displeased her.
“We need to come up with something without an –ist,” she’d say.
I was jealous of her solitudes, of the paths she walked down without me, of the books she took with her and read as if I did not exist. I now knew how to poke fun at myself in these excessively demanding moments, to make light of my tyrannical terrors. I was beginning to understand that you must learn to let all things leave you every so often — even your reason to live. That you must grant them their right to be a little inconstant, even: to take up with solitude, with the horizon, or with those tall plants whose name I didn’t know, the ones that lose their white heads at the tiniest gust of wind. When she abandoned me in this way to go off and “look for herself” — in a single day she might start out at the École du Louvre in Paris and end up studying biology in England — I felt I’d been chased out of her life for being insignificant. And yet I was awakening to the idea that it was not enough to love, that you also had to learn how to love, and I recalled my Uncle Ambrose’s advice to “hold tightly to the end of the line, so your kite doesn’t fly away and get lost in pursuit of the blue yonder.” I dreamt too high and too far. I had to accept the idea that I could only be my own life, and not Lila’s. Never before had the notion of liberty seemed so stern, so demanding, and so difficult. Liberty had, for all time, demanded sacrifices: I was too accustomed to the Fleury family history — “victims of mandatory public education” every last one of them, as my uncle put it — to contest that. But it had never occurred to me that loving a woman could also be a lesson in liberty. I set about it with courage and application: I no longer wandered the forest in search of Lila; I fought against the feelings of insignificance and inexistence that overcame me when her absences wore on; my feeling “less and less” very nearly became a kind of game, which I played until the moment when, the better to laugh about it, I would go and check in a mirror to be sure I had not shrunk to dwarf size.
It must be said that my damn memory didn’t make things any easier. When Lila left me, I could see her so clearly that from time to time I would reproach myself for spying on her. Is it necessary to have loved several women to learn to love a single one? Perhaps. Nothing can prepare us for a first love. And when Tad would say to me, as he did occasionally, “Come now, you’ll love other women in this life,” it seemed like an awfully harsh thing to say about this life.
In the castle were three libraries, each with crimson- and gilt-edged volumes lining the walls, and I visited them often, to search their books for a reason to live other than Lila. There wasn’t one. I was getting scared. I wasn’t even sure Lila truly loved me — was I just her “little French whim,” as Mama Bronicka had said to me one day? Lila had dubbed us — Tad, Bruno, Hans, and I — her “four horsemen of the anti-Apocalypse,” and all of us were to become champions of humanity, yet here I was with no idea of how to ride a horse. So when she abandoned me to myself, I took refuge in reading. We rarely saw Stas Bronicki in Gródek — he was tied up with an affair of honor in Warsaw; Genia, it was being said, had become the mistress of a leading statesman, and if her husband left her alone in the capital, the excess of obviousness might tarnish the Bronicki name — but one day, he happened upon me absorbed in a first edition of Montaigne, and declaimed, with an expansive gesture at his bibliophilic treasures: “I spent the most exalting and inspired hours of my youth here, and it is here I shall return, in my old age, to my true raison d’être: culture …”
“My father never read a book in his life,” Tad whispered in my ear. “But the sentiment is there.”
When Lila’s absences were long or when — in the very height of misfortune — Hans appeared and the two of them went riding together through the forest, the trancelike state I entered did not go unnoticed by my friends. Bruno would reassure me that I mustn’t feel jealous — you had to admit it: Hans was an excellent horseman. Tad would make an effort not to seem sarcastic, which for him was a truly unnatural act. Once, though, he lost his temper, when the Polish radio announced new concentrations of German troops along the “Corridor”: “Oh, please, what’s one pip-squeak heartache compared to Europe and freedom heading down the road to ruin?”
In one of the narrow little streets of Gródek, an old man with a handsome white mustache waved hello to me and invited me “into his humble abode.” On the sitting-room wall was a full-length portrait of Marshal Foch.
“Long live immortal France!” said my host.
“Long live eternal Poland!” I replied.
There was something all too mortal in these declarations of immortality. Of my entire stay, it was probably the only moment I felt doubt brush against me with a wing of misgiving. In the trust showed by every Polish person I encountered for “invincible France” was something that suddenly seemed to me to be closer to death than to the invincible. But that only lasted an instant. Immediately, I searched the Fleury “historical memory” and located the certainty that allowed me to return to Lila’s side and take her in my arms with the tranquil assurance of someone who, in so doing, is preserving world peace. I won’t try today, after forty million deaths, to find any excuses for myself, except perhaps for the naïveté from which both supreme sacrifice and shameful blindness can be born; but to me, nothing quelled the threat of war with such serenity as the heat of her lips on my neck, on my face — a heat I would never cease to feel there, even after they were long gone. When we are too happy, we run the risk of becoming monsters of contentment. When Polish people, seeing my tricolor insignia, would approach me in the street, I would reply curtly, “France is here,” brushing off anything that took the liberty of casting shadows over our future. Reluctantly, I accompanied Tad to a clandestine student meeting in Hel, where two rival schools of thought clashed: the one demanding immediate mobilization and the one affirming, if I understood correctly, that you had to know how to lose a purely military war in order to triumph in a different one, the one that would bring an end to a society of exploitation. My very rudimentary knowledge of Polish did not allow me to keep my bearings between these dialectics, so I sat there, politely but a bit ironically, my arms crossed over my chest, certain that my tranquil French presence was the answer to everything.
17
It was upon my return from this meeting that Count Bronicki held a solemn interview with me in the great oval hall known as the “Hall of Princes,” where some victorious treaty or another had been signed. I had been summoned to appear there at four o’clock in the afternoon and was waiting for him beneath the paintings, where Napoleon’s field marshals hung just a few yards away from Hetman Mazepa, fleeing in shame after his defeat; and from Jaroslav Bronicki, the hero whose celebrated charge had sealed the Turks’ defeat at Sobieski, before they reached Vienna. In various parts of the country, half a dozen painters labored for Stas Bronicki to preserve the oldest and noblest traditions of Polish history in paintbrushes and oils. The count was at that time engaged in a vast trade operation: eight million skins ordered from the Russians, including two-thirds of the total production of astrakhan and Persian lamb, sapphire mink, and longhairs: lynx, fox, bear, and wolf, which he was proposing to sell at a 400 percent profit on the other side of the Atlantic. I don’t know how the idea for this business had sprouted in his genius brain; today I believe he must have had some sort of intuition or premonition — just about the wrong kind of skin.
I spent several hours a day calculating potential profit margins based on prices in different world markets. The business was supposed to include nearly the entire pelt production of the Soviet Union in the years 19
40, 1941, and 1942, and enjoyed the support of the Polish government; it appeared to be a matter of high-level diplomacy: Colonel Beck, the foreign minister, having failed in his efforts to reach an agreement with Nazi Germany, was seeking to establish good relations with the USSR through trade relations. Probably never, in the entire history of humanity, had a bigger mistake been made as to the nature and the price of skins. You can still find the details of the affair in the Polish National Archives. One of the most awful sentences I’ve ever had occasion to hear uttered was from the mouth an eminent member of the Wildlife Society after the war: “We can at least be grateful that tens of millions of animals escaped massacre.”
I waited for Bronicki a good half hour. I didn’t know what he wanted from me. That same morning, we’d had a long work session about finding a place to store the furs, somewhere they could be preserved carefully so as not to flood the market and cause prices to collapse. There were also other complications: apparently Germany wanted in, too; rumor had it that they were prepared, over the next five years, to acquire every single Soviet skin. Bronicki had given no hint of this slightly ceremonious convocation during the course of the business meeting. “Wait for me at four o’clock in the Hall of Princes,” was all he had said, somewhat curtly, at the end.
When the door opened and Bronicki appeared, I noticed immediately that he was slightly “under the influence,” as the Polish tactfully say — pod wpływem. It was not out of character for him to empty half a bottle of cognac after a meal.
“I think the time has come for you to have a frank and open conversation with me, Monsieur Fleury.”
It was the first time he had bestowed a “Monsieur” on me and called me by my surname, placing what seemed to me to be a particular emphasis on the “Fleury.” He stood before me, in golfing trousers and jacket, his hands behind his back, from time to time lifting himself slightly onto his toes.
“I am fully aware of your relationship with my daughter. You are her lover.” He held up his hand. “No, no, there’s no use denying it. You are, I’m sure, a young man with a sense of honor and of the obligations this imposes. I believe, therefore, that your intentions are honorable. I just want to be sure of it.”
It took me a few seconds to return to my senses. All I managed to stammer was, “I do indeed wish to marry her, sir.” The rest, through which shuffled phrases like “the happiest of men” and “the very meaning of my life,” was lost in a mumble.
Bronicki looked me up and down, his chin thrust forward. “But I thought you to be an honorable man, Monsieur Fleury,” he said.
I no longer understood.
“I believed, as I have said to you, that your intentions were honorable. I regret to observe that they are not.”
“But …”
“That you are sleeping with my daughter is … how shall I say it? A pleasure that bears no consequences. We do not require sainthood of the women in our family: pride is sufficient for us. But my daughter marrying you, Monsieur Fleury, would be out of the question. I am sure that you have a brilliant future ahead of you, but given the name she bears, my daughter has all the chances in the world of marrying someone of royal blood. As you are well aware, she is regularly invited to the courts of England, Denmark, Luxembourg, and Norway …”
It was true. I had seen for myself the engraved cards lined up on the marble table in the hall. But they were nearly always for receptions, where the guests must have numbered in the hundreds. Lila had explained it to me: “It’s because of this accursed Corridor. Since our castle is, so to speak, at the heart of the problem, all those invitations are more political than they are personal.” And when he heard of these parties, Tad would grumble, “The drowned forest …” It was the title of a Walden poem that told the story of a submerged forest, from which the melodies of its drowned songbirds echoed each night.
I forced myself to contain my anger and show the phlegmatic English stoicism I admired so much in the novels of Kipling and Conan Doyle. Even today, I still wonder what feelings of pettiness and insignificance made up Stas Bronicki’s daydreams of grandeur. He stood before me, a glass of whiskey in hand, an eyebrow raised high above the blue and slightly glassy eye of a man “under the influence.” Perhaps at the bottom of it all was some mortal anxiety that nothing could transcend.
“As you wish, sir,” I replied. I nodded to him and left the room. It was as I descended the great, solemn staircase — one had the impression of stepping down centuries, rather than stairs — that I began to wish ardently for this war, which, according to Tad, would really be “the end of a world,” and would shake all those condescending monkeys down from the high branches of their family trees. I didn’t breathe a word of this interview to Lila; I wanted to spare her the shame and the tears. I discussed it with Tad, who reacted with one of those thin smiles, which were for him a kind of arm for the disarmed; three years later, we found in the pocket of a fallen SS officer a now famous photograph, of a Resistance fighter, his hands bound and his back against a wall, facing an execution squad — and on the face of this Frenchman who was about to die, my memory immediately recognized Tad’s smile. He refrained from any comment, probably because his father’s attitude seemed so natural to him, so self-evident in a society that was hanging on to the bulk of its sinking past as one clutches at a life preserver, but he ended up speaking to his sister about it; I found out that Lila had burst into her father’s office and called him a pimp. I was touched, but what appeared significant in Tad’s retelling of the scene was that Lila had reminded Stas Bronicki that, according to the local gossip, he was a bastard himself, the son of a stable boy. I could not help finding something amusing in the idea that even from the heights of her egalitarian indignation, Lila saw “son of a stable boy” as the worst of insults. In a nutshell, I was learning irony, and I don’t know if I owe it to Tad’s teachings, or whether, as I matured, I had begun spontaneously arming myself for life.
The result of this interview was that Lila began “dreaming of herself” in an entirely new way, and one that delighted Tad; she would enter my room loaded up with “subversive” literature, which until then Tad had unsuccessfully endeavored to get her to read; my bed was littered with pamphlets printed clandestinely by Tad’s “study group”; curled up beneath its canopy, which had sheltered the sleep of princes, her knees tucked under her chin, she would read Bakunin, Kropotkin, and excerpts from the work of a certain Gramsci, whom her brother ardently admired. She questioned me about the Popular Front, of which I knew almost nothing beyond the Léon Blum kite my uncle kept in a corner of his workshop; suddenly, she wanted to know everything about the Spanish Civil War and La Pasionaria, whose name she pronounced with lively interest, for in her new approach to the search, as she would say to me, there might be some possibilities there. She smoked cigarette after cigarette, stubbing them out with fervid resolve in the silver ashtrays I held out for her. I understood this manner of reassuring me, of displaying her tenderness toward me, and perhaps of loving me; I suspected strongly that there was, in her sudden revolutionary blaze, more elegance of sentiment than any actual conviction. We would end up tossing the books and pamphlets onto the floor and taking refuge in far less theoretical passions. I knew also that my simplistic vision of things, which could well have led me to the life of a rural postman, returning home every evening to Lila and our many children, was attributable to the same comical naïveté that had caused our distinguished visitors to laugh so heartily at the “certified postman” and his childish kites. I recognized in this quality the survival of some primal ancestral strain that could not be eradicated — and that couldn’t have fit more poorly with Lila’s expectations for the man to whom she would tie her fate. Timidly, I asked her one night: “If I graduated from the Polytechnical Institute at the top of my class, would you …”
“Would I what?”
I held my tongue. It was not a question of what I would do in life, but what a woman was
going to do with mine. And I didn’t understand that my companion was intuiting the possibility of an entirely different “me” and an entirely different “we,” in a world she vaguely sensed was drawing near every time she sought shelter in my arms and murmured, “The earth will shake.”
Squadrons of cavalrymen crossed Gródek with their swords and their flags, singing as they went, to take up their positions on the German border.
It was said that a superior officer from the French General Staff had come to inspect the fortifications at Helm and had declared them “worthy, in certain ways, of our own Maginot Line.”
Nearly every week, Hans von Schwede continued to make clandestine, forbidden border crossings on his handsome gray steed to spend a few days with his cousins. I knew that in so doing he was risking his career and occasionally even his life to be near Lila. He told us that he had been shot at several times, once on the Polish side, once on the German. His presence was difficult for me to bear; even more difficult was his friendship with Lila. They took long rides through the forest together on horseback. I didn’t understand this aristocratic fraternizing above the fray; in it, there seemed to me, was an absence of principle. I would go to the music room, where Bruno practiced the piano the whole day through. He had been invited to participate in the Chopin competition in Edinburgh, and was preparing for his departure for England. England, too, during those perilous days, was attempting to lavish on Poland encouraging signs of its serene power.
“I cannot understand how the Bronickis could welcome a man who is about to become an officer in the enemy army into their home,” I declared to Bruno, flopping into an armchair.
“There’s always time to be enemies, old man.”
“Bruno, someday you’ll die of kindness, tolerance, and gentleness.”