“Well, given the options, it isn’t a bad way to go.”
I would never forget that moment. I would never forget his long fingers on the keyboard, that tender face under its thatch of hair. When fate finally laid its cards on the table, nothing would have prepared me for the change it signaled: Bruno’s card really must have been drawn from another deck. But then again, fate sometimes does play with its eyes shut.
18
Summer was past its prime — nothing but clouds and fog; the sun just barely nibbled at the horizon line; the pines quieted, their branches stilled by the seaside damp. It was already the windless season that awaits the equinoctial gales. There were butterflies we’d never seen, velvety dark brown, bigger and heavier than those of summer. Lila remained nestled in my arms and I’d never yet felt myself so present in her silences.
“We’re making memories for ourselves,” she would say.
Of all the hours of the day, five o’clock in the afternoon was my worst enemy, for the air became too cool and the sand too damp. We had to get up, to part, to cut ourselves in two. There was still one last good moment when Lila would draw the blanket over us, pressing herself a little closer to me for warmth. At around five thirty, the Baltic would suddenly grow old; its voice would become crankier, more cantankerous. The shadows would swoop down on us with vaporous wing strokes. One last embrace, until Lila’s voice died on her lips, unmoving and half-open; her widened eyes would lose their quick; her heart would slowly calm against my chest. In those moments, I was still stupid enough to feel like a master builder, proud of his force. All of these conceits would disappear when I understood that I loved Lila in a way that accepted no limits, including the limit of sexuality, and that there is a dimension to a couple that never ceases to grow, even as everything else dwindles away.
“What’s going to become of you when we part, Ludo?”
“I’ll die like a dog.”
“Don’t be silly.”
“I’ll die for fifty years, eighty years — I don’t know. The Fleurys are long-lived, so you don’t need to worry: I’ll take good care of you, even after you’ve been gone a long time.”
I was sure I’d keep her and I did not yet have any idea of how comical the reason for my certainty really was. Contained in this faith in my virility was all of the naive “triumphalism” of my eighteen years. Each time I heard her rising moans, I told myself that I was what was going on in there and that no one could do any better. These were probably the last moments of my adolescent naïveté.
“I don’t know if I should see you again, Ludo. I want to stay whole.”
I kept quiet. Let her go on “searching for herself,” she would find only me. The twilight thickened around us; the gulls’ cries came from very far off and already resembled memories.
“You’re wrong, my dear. My future is in the bag. With my uncle’s prestige, I’m almost certain to get a nice job with the postal service in Cléry, and then you can finally see what life is really all about.”
She laughed. “Well, now there’s a class struggle. That’s not what it’s all about, Ludo.”
“What is it all about? Hans?”
“Don’t be petty.”
“Do you love me, yes or no?”
“I love you, but that’s not where everything ends. I don’t want to become your other half. Do you know that horrible expression? ‘Where’s my other half?’ ‘You haven’t seen my other half, have you?’ When I see you in five years, or ten, I want to feel my heart ringing out. But if you come home every single evening, year after year, it won’t ring out anymore — it would just be the doorbell jingling.”
She pushed away the blanket and got up. Sometimes I still wonder what happened to it, that old Zakopane blanket. I left it there because we were going to return, and we never returned.
19
On July 27, ten days before my departure, a special train from Warsaw brought Genitchka Bronicka home, in the company of the commander in chief of the Polish army and marshal of Poland, Rydz-Śmigły himself, a man with a shaven head and ferocious, bushy eyebrows, who spent all his time at an easel, painting delicate watercolors. It was the famous “weekend of confidence,” whose calm assurance was celebrated by the entire press. The idea was to display proof to the world of the commander in chief’s serenity about the future, just as Hitler’s vociferations from Berlin were reaching a fever pitch. A photograph of the marshal sitting peacefully in the middle of the “Corridor,” painting his watercolors, was reproduced with admiring comments in the British and French presses. The other guests Genitchka had brought with her from Warsaw included a famous psychic, an actor who was introduced to us as the “greatest Hamlet of all time,” and a young writer whose first novel was, any minute now, going to be translated into every language. The psychic was invited to read our futures in a crystal ball, which she did, but she refused to tell us what she saw, for, given our youth, it would have been fatal to incite us to passivity by showing us the paths in life that had already been traced out for us. She did not, on the other hand, hesitate to predict the Polish army’s victory over the Hitlerian hydra to Marshal Rydz-Śmigły; however, she concluded her prophecy with a rather sibylline remark: “But everything will turn out well in the end.” Hans, who had been at the castle since the day before, remained discreetly in his room for the duration of this “weekend of confidence,” as the press described the event. The marshal took a return train that evening, followed by the greatest Hamlet of all time, once the latter had, at the end of dinner, recited to us with incontestable sincerity the famous “to be or not to be” monologue, which, while being quite apropos, was not really in keeping with the atmosphere of optimism that everyone was supposed to be displaying. As for the young novelist, he sat among us with a distant expression, examining his fingernails and smiling somewhat condescendingly from time to time whenever Madame Bronicka attempted to tackle a literary subject; that was sacred ground, which he did not intend to defile with the banality of society chatter. He disappeared the next day, escorted to the station after an incident that had occurred in the steam baths reserved for the domestic staff; the precise nature of the “incident” was kept quiet, but for the writer it had resulted in a black eye, as well as a trying interview between Walenty the gardener and Madame Bronicka, during which Genitchka attempted to explain that “talent must be forgiven certain vagaries, without anger.” It was a disastrous weekend in every way: six golden plates, as well as a Longhi painting and a miniature by Bellini, had disappeared from Madame Bronicka’s little blue sitting room. Suspicions first came to rest on the psychic, who had departed the day before, since Genitchka could not resign herself to incriminating great literature. My stupefaction may be understood when, on Monday evening, I opened my closet to remove a shirt and discovered a hatbox containing the Longhi painting, the Bellini miniature, and the six golden plates. I stood there uncomprehendingly for a moment, but the stolen objects really were there, in my closet, and the reason they had been put there occurred to me suddenly, in a searing flash of horror: someone was trying to dishonor me. It didn’t take me long to find the name of the only enemy capable of hatching such a plot: the German. An odious but clever way of getting rid of the little Norman hayseed who had committed the unpardonable crime of loving Lila.
It was seven o’clock. I tore into the corridor. Hans’s room was located in the eastern wing of the castle, overlooking the sea. I remember that when I arrived at his door, I had a curious surge of the “good manners” I’d caught rubbing shoulders with elegant company: should I knock at the door, or not? Given the circumstances, it seemed to me that I should consider myself in enemy territory and shrug off convention. I pressed down on the heavy bronze door handle and entered. The room was empty. Like mine, it was all nobility and grandeur, its walls covered with imperial eagles, its furniture whose every empty seat evoked an image of some lordly fundament, and the lances of the Polish Imperial Guardsm
en crossed over the fire burning in the fireplace. I heard the sound of a shower running. I hesitated to enter the bathroom — it wasn’t the place to settle an affair of honor. I returned to the door, opened it, and closed it again, noisily. A few more seconds and Hans entered. He was wearing a black bathrobe with some sort of insignia of his military academy on the collar. His blond hair and face were dripping with water.
“You bastard!” I cried. “It was you.”
He had his hands in the pockets of his bathrobe. That imperturbability, that total absence of emotion — they belonged to a man not only accustomed to treachery, but for whom it was second nature.
“You stole those things and you put them in my closet to dishonor me!”
For the first time, there was the trace of an expression on his face. The beginnings of ironic surprise, as if he were incredulous at the idea that honor could be a question for me. It was all that disdainful superiority, hereditary as syphilis, of people who had possessed the privilege of disdain since birth. “I could knock you out right here, with my bare fists,” I told him. “But that’s not enough. I’ll be waiting for you in the gun room at eleven o’clock tonight.”
I left the room and returned to mine, where I found Marek, the valet, had come to fetch my shoes, which he shined morning and evening. He was a stocky lad, with pomaded hair and a czub shaped into a kiss-curl in the middle of his forehead, always cheerful and a great fan of the ladies. He made my bed, attempting as usual to communicate with me by reducing his Polish to the few rudimentary words he deemed likely to figure in my vocabulary. Since my arrival in Gródek, I had felt great friendliness toward the castle’s domestic staff, who were, after all, like me, just peasants in disguise. Nothing is harder to vanquish than prejudice, and favorable prejudices are no less tenacious than the others.
Marek beat the pillows back into their nice obese form, turned down the coverlet, and then moved toward the closet. He opened it, and, apparently paying no attention to the hatbox and its contents — you could see the gold tableware sparkling — removed my pair of spare shoes. Then he shut the closet again and went away, my shoes in hand.
It was useless for me now to signal the presence of the stolen art in my room to Madame Bronicka, as I had intended to do. Marek had seen them, so it would have been presumed that, all being lost for me, I was attempting a preemptive strike.
At eight, when the dinner gong rang, I went downstairs. I was always seated to the right of the countess, in honor of France. Hans was seated at the foot of the table. I had always found that there was something feminine in his facial features, although it would have been impossible to use the word “effeminate.” He looked at me from time to time with the trace of a smile. I was so nervous that I could neither eat nor speak. There were two enormous candelabra on the oaken table, and our faces darkened or glowed at the will of the breezes, in a play of shadow and light. Tad had just turned nineteen, and was suffering from his position at the crossroads in life where virility has already begun aspiring to accomplishments that adolescence still forbids; he was speaking of the war that the Spanish Republicans had lost against Franco, in passionate tones that must have matched those of Byron’s followers, or Garibaldi’s. Madame Bronicka listened to him in consternation as she fiddled with the crumbs on the table. That her son would allow himself such fervor in memory of Catalonia, where the anarchists had danced in the streets with exhumed nuns’ corpses, only confirmed in her eyes, as she often repeated to us, the nefarious influence of Picasso on today’s youth. There was no doubt in her mind that all of the horrors that had taken place in Spain were, directly or indirectly, his work. It had all begun with the surrealists, she told us, with an air Tad called “definitive.”
As soon as dinner ended, I kissed Genitchka’s hand and returned to my room. Several times, Lila had looked at me with surprise, for, never having learned the polite art of masking my emotions, it was difficult for me to hide my fury. When I left the dining room she followed me, stopping at the foot of the stairs. “What’s wrong, Ludo?”
“Nothing.”
“What did I do to you?”
“Leave me alone. You’re not the only one who matters.”
Never had I spoken to her in that way. Had I been ten years older, I would have wept with rage and humiliation. But I was still too young: my idea of virility had marked tears as feminine, refusing manliness its full portion of brotherhood.
Her lips trembled slightly. I had hurt her. I felt better. Less alone.
“I’m sorry Lila, I have a heavy heart. I don’t know if that expression exists in Polish.”
“Ciężkie serce,” she said.
“I’ll explain everything to you tomorrow.”
I climbed the stairs. I felt as if I had finally spoken to Lila on equal terms. I turned around. It seemed to me that there was a trace of anxiety in her expression. Perhaps she feared losing me — she did have an overactive imagination.
It wasn’t just me: I felt wounded in the deepest part of my family. Not one single Fleury had been left unsullied by the insult. That I had been taken as a readymade victim by Hans, with what credibility my humble origins might lend me the natural role of the guilty party, plunged me into a state of frustration and fury that, in history, has always caused the roles of the victim and executioner to flip back and forth on a metronome of hatred. I had fallen prey to a febrile impatience that turned every passing minute into another enemy. Time, it seemed to me, that shabby old nobleman, was dragging itself along with premeditated slowness and perhaps even hostility toward me, as if it were some kind of venerable accomplice to its own aristocratic past.
I believe I owe my first dawning of social awareness to Hans.
20
At five minutes to eleven, I went downstairs.
The gunroom was low-ceilinged, fifty yards long and ten yards wide. You could see the brickwork through the plaster. At the apex of the vaulted ceiling was an incongruous Venetian chandelier, disfigured on one side, where it had lost some of its branches. The floor was covered with a big, worn Carpathian rug. Suits of armor stood in rows against the walls, which were covered with pikes and sabers.
Hans was waiting for me at the other end of the room. He wore a white shirt and the trousers of his dinner suit. A cigarette burned away between his fingertips: everywhere he went he carried one of those round metal boxes of English cigarettes, with a picture of a bearded sailor on the top. Players, they were called. He was very calm. Obviously, I told myself, he knows I’ve never handled a sword before, and like a good Prussian, he’s been fencing since childhood.
I removed my jacket and let it fall to the ground. I looked at the walls. I didn’t know which weapon to choose: what I really needed was a good old Norman stick. In the end, I picked up what was in reach: an old Polish szabelka, a curved, Turkish-style saber. Hans set down the box of Players on the carpet and went to stub out his cigarette in a corner. I took up a position beneath the chandelier and waited as he took another sword from the wall.
As is often the case when you find yourself alone, face-to-face with a man you have spent a long time hating, who your imagination has punished over and over, my anger had cooled off quite a bit. The reality of an enemy is always disappointing compared to the idea you have put together of him. And suddenly something dawned on me that disturbed and nearly paralyzed me: his vague resemblance to Lila. It was that same blondness, that same coloring, and a certain similarity in their traits. I realized that if I stayed there without reacting for a few seconds longer, I was going to lose an enemy. I had to rekindle the flame quickly.
“Only a Nazi could have come up with something so low,” I spat at him. “You can’t accept the idea that she loves me. You can’t accept the idea that she and I are forever. So, like all Nazis, you needed your Jew. You took those things and you put them in my closet. But your miserable plan is idiotic. Even if I were a scoundrel, Lila would still love me.
You don’t know what it is, to truly love someone. It pardons nothing, and at the same time it pardons everything.”
There was no way for it to occur to me that two years later, I would be able to say the same thing about France.
I raised my weapon. I was vaguely aware that you had to advance with one foot and keep the other behind you, as I had seen in Scaramouche at the Gródek cinema. Hans observed me with interest. He looked at my right foot, which I had placed in front of me, my left foot behind me, and at the saber I had raised above my head like a woodsman’s axe. He kept his weapon lowered. I bent both knees and bounced up and down in place a few times. I sensed that I must have looked like a frog. Hans bit his lips and I understood that it was to keep from laughing. So I let out a sort of inarticulate cry and rushed at him. I was stupefied when I saw the blood spurting from his left cheek. He had not moved, and he had not yet lifted his sword. I straightened myself slowly, lowering my arm. The blood flowed more and more abundantly on Hans’s face, soaking his shirt. The first clear idea that occurred to me was that I had probably gone against all of the rules of dueling. All at once, the feeling of boorishness overtook me again, and my shame was so monstrous that it metamorphosed into rage, and I raised my saber once more and gave a desperate yell: “You can all go to hell!”
Hans raised his sword at the same time as I did, and, in the second that followed, my szabelka was torn from my hand and flew through the air. Hans lowered his weapon and looked at me with furrowed eyebrows and tightened jaw, without the least bit of attention to the blood that was running in rivulets down his face.
“Asshole!” he said. “Goddamn asshole!”
He threw his sword against the wall and turned his back on me. There was blood on the carpet.
Hans picked up his box of Players and took out a cigarette. “You were wrong to rush things,” he told me. “It’ll happen soon enough anyway.”