“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.”
5
The next day, at around four in the afternoon, just when I had begun to tell myself that all was lost, and that I would have to accomplish what is sometimes the most superhuman effort of all — forgetting — a gigantic blue convertible with the top down stopped in front of our house. A distinguished-looking driver in a gray uniform announced my invitation to tea at “the manor.” As quickly as I could, I polished my old shoes, put on my only suit, which was now too small, and seated myself beside the chauffeur, who turned out to be English. He informed me that Stanislas de Bronicki, “Mademoiselle’s” father, was a wizard financier, and that his wife had been one of Warsaw’s greatest comediennes. She had given up her career, but compensated for the sacrifice by constantly making scenes.
“They have extensive properties in Poland, including a castle where Monsieur the count receives statesmen and celebrities from all over the world. Believe it, my boy, he’s really somebody. If he takes a shine to you, your life’s not going to end with a career in the postal service.”
Le Manoir des Jars was a great wooden structure, three stories high, with verandas and sculpted balustrades, turrets, and latticework balconies. Resembling nothing else in our region, it was an exact copy of a house that cousins of the Bronickis, the Ostrorog family, owned on the Bosporus, in Istanbul. It was built tucked away into grounds whose drives and pathways you could just glimpse through the gate, and figured prominently among the picture postcards sold at the Petit Gris, the Cléry café and tobacconist’s shop, in the rue du Mail. Its Turkish style was all the rage in 1902, when it was built by Stanislas de Bronicki’s father as a tribute to his friend Pierre Loti, who was a frequent guest there. Age and dampness had darkened the wooden boards of the house with a blackish patina, which Bronicki refused to touch, for authenticity’s sake. My uncle knew the manor well, and had often spoken of it to me. His work as a postman had once brought him there almost daily, for the Bronickis received more mail than all the rest of Clos and Cléry combined.
“Rich people don’t have their heads on straight,” he grumbled. “Building a Turkish house in Normandy — I bet they had a Norman manor built in Turkey, too.”
It was the end of June, and the park was fully resplendent. Never before had I seen nature so carefully tended — the nature I knew was raw and simple. The flowers looked well nourished enough to have been fed by the hand of Marcellin Duprat himself.
“They’ve got five full-time gardeners working here,” said the chauffeur.
He left me alone in front of the veranda.
I tugged off my beret, licked my hand and slicked down my hair, then climbed the steps. As soon as I rang, a frantic chambermaid pulled open the door, and I saw that I couldn’t have come at a worse time. A blonde woman, dressed in what appeared to be a tangled heap of blue-and-rose-colored chiffon, was half prostrate in a chair, sobbing; a worried-looking Dr. Gardieu held his old pocket watch in one hand while feeling her pulse with the other; a smallish but powerfully built man, wearing a
silver dressing gown that shone like a suit of armor, paced the length of the sitting room; a butler followed behind him, bearing a tray full of drinks. Stas de Bronicki had a head of curls as blond as a baby’s, sideburns that went halfway down his cheeks, and a face you might have said was lacking in nobility, if such a thing could be detected with the naked eye, without any recourse to supporting documentation. It was round, with heavy, ham-colored jowls; a face you could easily imagine leaning over the block at a butcher’s stall; a thin mustache, little more than a downy fuzz, ornamented lips that pursed and protruded like the back end of a chicken, giving him a constantly aggrieved look that was particularly evident at the moment of my arrival. His big, slightly bugged eyes were a faded blue — their gleam bore more than a passing resemblance to the bottles on the butler’s tray, and the fixedness of his gaze must have had something to do with the contents of these same bottles. Lila was seated tranquilly off to one side, waiting for a miniature poodle to stand up on its hind legs and be given a treat. A predatory-looking individual dressed all in black sat at a desk, so hunched and absorbed in the pile of papers through which he was rifling that he seemed to be examining them with his long, ferrety nose.
I waited timidly, beret in hand, for someone to notice me. Lila, first throwing me a distracted look, finally bestowed the treat upon the poodle. Then she came over to me and took my hand. At this same moment, sobs overcame the beautiful lady again, even more wracking than before, which the assembled company greeted with total indifference.
Lila said: “It’s nothing, just the cotton again.”
And, as I must have looked at her with a face flooded with incomprehension, she added, as an explanation, “Papa went and got himself into cotton again. He can’t help it.” With a little shrug, she added, “We did a lot better in coffee.”
I did not yet know that Stanislas de Bronicki made and lost fortunes on the stock exchange with such speed that no one could ever say for certain whether he was ruined or rich.
Stanislas de Bronicki — Stas to his gaming circle and racetrack friends as well as to his lady escorts at Le Chabanais and Le Sphinx — was forty-five at the time. I was always surprised and a little uneasy at the contrast between his massive, heavy face and its features, which were so tiny that, to use the words of the Comtesse de Noailles, “you had to look for them.” There was also something incongruous in his curly, baby-blond hair, his rosy complexion, and the blue Saxon gaze — the whole Bronicki family, except for the son, Thaddeus, seemed entirely blue, blond, and pink. A speculator and a gambler, Stas de Bronicki sent money tumbling across the gambling table as offhandedly as his ancestors had once sent their soldiers charging into the field of battle. The only thing he hadn’t ever gambled away was his title: he belonged to one of Poland’s four or five great aristocratic lineages, like the Houses of Sapieha, Radziwiłł, and Czartoryski, which had for so many years divided Poland up among themselves, until the country passed into other hands and was subjected to other divisions. I noticed that his eyes tended to roll around a little in their sockets, as if following the motions of all the balls he’d seen rolling around the roulette wheel.
Lila led me to her father, but he, with his hand to his forehead and his eyes directed toward the ceiling, from whence the ruin had apparently fallen, paid not the slightest attention to me. So I was led before Madame de Bronicka. There was a pause in her crying, and a human eye with more eyelashes around it than I had ever before encountered in my life was trained upon me. The handkerchief was removed from her sobbing lips, and a small, still-stricken voice demanded: “Where does this one come from?”
“I met him in the forest,” Lila said.
“In the forest? Good heavens, how horrible! I hope he isn’t rabid. All the animals are getting rabies right now. I read it in the paper. If you get bitten, there’s a treatment you have to take, it’s very painful … you can’t be too careful …” She leaned over and picked up the poodle. Clasping it to her, she regarded me with suspicion.
“Mother, please. Calm yourself,” Lila told her.
And so it was that I met the Bronickis for the first time, in their natural state, which is to say, in crisis. Genia de Bronicka — later I learned that the “de” disappeared whenever the family returned to Poland, where the name did not take a preposition, and then resurfaced in France, where they weren’t as well known — was a beauty of a kind once known as devastating, an expression that is no longer in fashion, most likely due to inflation among the devastations the world has known since it was. She was quite slender, but it was the variety of slender that makes a respectful detour at the hips and the chest — one of those women who are so beautiful they don’t know what to do with themselves.
A motion of the handkerchief, and I was waved aside definitively. Lila, still holding me by the hand, drew me down a corridor and up some stairs. There were three floors between the grand entry hall, where the cotton crisis was occurring, and the attic, but I believe that during this brief ascension I learned more details about certain odd things that happen between men and women than I had heard in my entire existence up to that point. We had just made it up the first few steps when Lila informed me that Genia’s first husband had killed himself on their wedding night, before entering the bridal chamber.
“Performance anxiety,” Lila explained to me, still holding me firmly by the hand, perhaps fearing that I’d turn tail and run.
Her second husband, on the other hand, had died from an excess of self-confidence. “Exhaustion,” Lila informed me, looking me straight in the eye, as if to warn me, and I wondered what on earth she could mean.
“My mother was the greatest actress in Poland; she had to have a special servant just for the flowers she received all the time. She was kept by King Alphonso XIII, by King Carol of Romania … but she only ever loved one man in her life, I can’t tell you his name, it’s a secret —”
“Rudolph Valentino,” said a voice.
We had just arrived in the attic, and, turning in the direction of the sarcasm-laden remark, I saw a boy sitting cross-legged on the floor beneath a gabled window, an atlas open over his knees. Beside him was a globe. He had the profile of a young eagle, with a nose that presided over the rest of his visage as if it were master of his face and features. His hair was black, his eyes brown, and although he was only a year or two older than I, the thinness of his lips seemed already to have been shaped by irony; it was impossible to tell whether he was smiling or if he’d been born that way.
“Listen carefully to what my little sister tells you, because there’s never a word of truth in it, and that shapes the imagination. Lila’s need to lie is so great that you can’t hold it against her. It’s a calling. I, on the other hand, have a scientific and rationalist mind, which is totally unique in this family. My name’s Tad.”
He got up and we shook hands. At the other end of the attic was a red curtain, and behind it, someone was playing the piano.
Lila didn’t seem at all bothered by her brother’s words, and observed me with a slightly amused expression.
“Do you believe me, or not?” she asked me.
I didn’t hesitate: “I believe you.”
She shot her brother a triumphant look and went and sat down in a big, shabby armchair.
“Oh well, already in love, I see,” Tad observed. “In that case, reason is out of the question. I live with a mother who’s completely mad, a father who would gamble away all of Poland if given the opportunity, and a sister who considers truth as her personal enemy. Have you two known each other long?”
I started to answer, but he held up his hand.
“Wait, wait — since yesterday?”
I nodded, yes.
Admitting to him that I had seen Lila one single time four years ago, and that I hadn’t stopped thinking of her since, could only expose me to some other form of blistering sarcasm.
“Just as I thought,” s
aid Tad. “She lost Shako the poodle yesterday and she needed a quick replacement.”
“Shako came back this morning,” Lila announced.
The siblings were clearly used to these verbal jousts.
“Well, I hope she won’t send you away, then. And if ever she starts leading you round in circles come and see me. If you need a little reminder that two and two still make four, I’m your man. And if you do want my advice, get out while you can.”
He returned to his corner, sat back down, and took up his atlas again. Lila, her head leaning against the back of the armchair, stared off into space, oblivious. I hesitated a moment, then went over to her and seated myself on a cushion at her feet. She drew her knees up beneath her chin and regarded me pensively, as if she were wondering how best to make use of her new acquisition. I bowed my head to this examining gaze while Tad, furrowing his brow, traced his finger over the globe, following a route down the Niger, the Volga, the Orinoco — I couldn’t say. From time to time, I lifted my eyes, met Lila’s meditative gaze, and lowered them again, fearing I might hear her say, “No, you won’t do after all; I was wrong.” I felt I was at a turning point in my life — the world had a center of gravity different from the one I’d learned about in school. Half of me wished to stay there, at her feet, till the end of my days, and the other half of me wanted to flee; even now, I don’t know whether I succeeded in life because I didn’t take off running, or whether I came to ruin because I stayed.
Lila laughed and touched my nose with the tips of her fingers.
“You seem completely beside yourself, you poor boy,” she said. “Tad, he’s only seen me twice in four years and he’s already lost his mind. What is it about me, anyway? Why do they all fall in love with me so madly? They take one look at me, and just like that, intelligent conversation is impossible. All they do is sit there staring at me, going ‘um’ and ‘ah’ from time to time.”